Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

For the launch of the third of the X-Men franchise movies, "Last Stand" Organic worked with Myspace to allow users exclusive functionality if they added the X-Men profile (www.myspace.com/xmenthelaststand) as a friend. The media plan included promotion to this page and skinning myspace.com home page for the first time ever.

The results?

More than 3 million members of the myspace.com community added X-Men as friends in 1 month leading up to the movie's release on 5/1/06. This help drive a massive $107 million three-day opening, the largest ever for Memorial Day weekend and the fourth-biggest in box office history.

Campaign done, lets go home.

Post launch the profile was turned into a one stop shop for digital swag and DVD sales. Which would not be a bad exit strategy... if you were not planning additional movies in the X-Men franchise (at least 3 upcoming movies are on the books from what I can tell). It appears that there was little to no dialogue with the community by 20th Century Fox since "Last Stand" and consequently the friend base dropped to 1.7MM users.

I have never lost 1.3 MM friends, but I am sure it hurts. How much does it hurt? This is just a guesstimate but let's assume a conservative 30% conversion rate of friends to ticket holder and that Fox gets 50% of each ticket sold at an average price of $7.08 per ticket.

$1.38MM worth of friends. Ouch.

Could they have kept all of those friends in the interim? Probably not, but they definitely could have kept a lot of them by engaging this community in between launches. A few suggestions:
-For hardcore fans get stan lee on myspace to answer questions
-For Hugh Jackman fans (preparing for "Wolverine" remember?) create a profile for him and tie this into the page
-How about plot teasers for upcoming movies, sending press releases through this community, or asking the community what X-Men they would like to see the origin of*?

20th Century Fox is now preparing for the next launch in the series X-Men Origins "Wolverine" and they are starting off on the right foot. They are leveraging their existing audience to spread the word and have just posted the trailer on the new Wolverine page over 5 months in advance of the movie release. Hopefully between "Wolverine" and "Magneto" (guessing a 2012 release date) they will engage and maintain their community better.

-Russ Hopkinson

*20th Century Fox if you are listening - Colossus Origins has all the makings of a great movie - new cold war overtones, risqué relationship with Kitty Pride and just an awesome character