The New Face Of Awards Season Ad Campaigns

The inimitable Moira Rose of Schitt’s Creek famously said that her favorite season is “awards.” As millions of football fans nationwide wind down from their big game, the playoffs are still in full swing for cinephiles — and it’s anyone’s guess who will win this race.

The awards game isn’t played on a field, but rather through carefully curated “For Your Consideration” (FYC) campaigns that have only gotten more sophisticated and important in recent years. For better or for worse, the rise of premium at-home streaming content — not to mention increasingly high ticket prices — has diminished movie theater attendance, both for major blockbusters and small indie awards-contenders. With such crowded fields, as one president of a communications firm that has run recent successful Emmy campaigns put it, “You really need to have a 360-degree campaign.”

Historically, FYC ad campaigns have been very analog, and restricted to a few specific mediums. The most visible one is out-of-home. Anyone who has driven down one of the major thoroughfares in Los Angeles in the months leading up to a big awards show can tell you that FYC campaigns are nothing new. Clever marketers and studios have long plastered every inch of available LA billboard space to maximize visibility in places that many Academy voters frequent.

But LA-specific advertising is less and less effective as the voting bodies for the Oscars, the Emmys, the Grammys, and more have been expanded in recent years to increase diversity and invite a more international contingent of perspectives to decide the winners. The Oscars have even implemented further diversity qualifications that films must meet in order to be considered for awards. Alongside this larger voting body and stricter rules is the reality that there’s just so much more content now – one single streamer of many, Netflix, hosts more than 13,000 titles globally. This all means that artists, studios, and marketers have had to get more strategic and think outside the box to make their pieces of content stand out and generate buzz.

The playbook for a successful awards campaign nowadays has three main factors, not all of which are controllable by the powers at be:

1. Viral moments/social media buzz: In today’s day and age, nothing is more powerful than a viral moment. Timothee Chalamet has proven that with his one-man marketing blitz for his recent film A Complete Unknown that saw him not only dressing identically to Bob Dylan (wig and all) on the red carpet (gaining attention from meme lovers everywhere) but also appearing on ESPN’s College Gameday (courting men, a demographic that isn’t historically Timothee’s strong suit but is Bob Dylan’s), a stark contrast to the more traditional actor FYC playbook that usually consists of magazine covers, emotionally-charged interviews, and countless Q&As with voters and other influential audiences. Even if Timothee doesn’t take home an Oscars statuette, the film’s box office success suggests that his 360-degree marketing strategy, targeting vastly different desired audiences with highly specific content, did what it set out to do.
2. Personalized voter outreach: From dedicated FYC websites (check out Netflix, Amazon, and Apple’s versions) to inventive mailed PR packages that contain everything from branded hats, t-shirts, and other merchandise to contextually-relevant food or beauty products, studios are investing large amounts of money in splashy, expensive voter outreach. One of this year’s major awards contenders, The Substance, sent out a syringe pen to mirror the syringe that’s central to the plot of the film.
3. Conscientious, strategic location-based advertising: The emergence of sophisticated, location-specific digital advertising is a game changer for FYC campaigns. Marketers no longer have to hope voters drive down Sunset Boulevard in order to see their billboard. They can target voters with a full court press of digital ads, from takeovers of Hollywood trade publications like Deadline and Variety to activations at high-traffic, high-visibility locations like sports games.

In such a competitive environment, winning a major entertainment award requires a certain amount of luck. But by effectively utilizing new technologies and finding promotional opportunities in unlikely places, both digital and IRL, studios, creators, and marketing professionals can cultivate a reputational foundation that allows their titles to cut through the crowded field of content consumers have at their fingertips.

Awards season isn’t just for movies! Check out the latest wins for Infillion’s campaign work here.