The Success and the General Marketing Mechanism
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Obviously the Chinese filmmakers created a miracle on marketing a $5-million-dollar road film Lost In Thailand/Tai Jiong into a blockbuster that grossed $200 million dollars domestically. Applying the known tipping point theory that Malcolm Gladwell popularized with his same-name book The Tipping Point, I've went through three different instruments the Enlight Media Group used to achieve this phenomenal film marketing legend.
According to Gladwell's The Tipping Point, a previously infamous concept or product can "tip" - become "viral" in today's term - with 3 kinds of people/vehicles:
1. CONNECTORS - The centers of social gravity who/that are connected to many people and can therefore easily get a large proportion of people to know about what's going on.
2. MAVENS - The information sources whom/which others go to for information and details. They are enthusiastic to share what they know and the only thing a maven does not do is to persuade - which makes one a salesman.
3.SALESMEN - Not necessarily persuading people all the time, but what he or she says and how he/she acts results to be persuasive and causes actions.
The Double Insurance of Two Rounds of Tipping
One of the greatest "inventions" of the production and distribution company of the film is that they secured the film to tip by transforming the connectors, mavens, and salesmen involved. In other words, they used the first round of tipping to propagate the film's release - the information and expectation of the film - pre theatrical release, they teased and turned the entire public into connectors, mavens, and salesmen to further propagate and engage starting before the initial release and kept it going during showtime - achieving the second round of tipping which eventually tipped the film's box office - for an extremely long period compare to the life cycle of a film in cinema.
The Changing Mechanism
The Enlight Media is indeed a group of intelligent strategist that they know they cannot just sit there deadly and wait for the potential connector and maven characters out there in the crowd whom no one knows if and when will become connectors and mavens for the film, so they hired the first round of connectors, and paid to successfully attain the strongest mavens to carry information they designed. They can gather them, grab their eyeballs, motivate or even seduce them to participate; however, about the only thing they cannot do is to decide what the people think and talk about it afterwards. And indeed, this whole campaign is not what was tipping. It is part and actually the activation of the tipping mechanism. Tipping, after all, is a word of mouth epidemic. The mouths cannot be just those of the production side, but of the target audience. If the target says no, the marketing will just be a man-made tipping delusion that fails and all the marketing cost goes in vain. Luckily, they won the rest of the war basically because the product – the movie – itself has to be a good movie. Leaving the movie aside, let’s look at the rest and most important part of the chain reaction.
The Amazing Role of Social Media
Different from many – actually most – marketing cases, Lost in Thailand had an incredibly precious marketing content – originals from the internet users. There were cumulatively 9,999,946 tweets on weibo.com (The Chinese Twitter) on February 14th - 9 weeks and 1 day after its initial theatrical release on 2012-12-12, 6 days before its extended off-screen date on 2013-02-20.
Similarly, there were 259,312 posts/comments/shares/statuses on renren.com (the Chinese Facebook but only used by students) that contain the keyword “Tai Jiong” (Pinyin for Lost in Thailand) on February 14th and the hottest post - a "share" of a behind-the-scene video - was shared 34,490 times just within that single social network Facebook.
Update: this number went up to 11,205,503 on 2013-04-24: 1,205,557 more tweets in two months after the film is off from the cinemas. Note that this is especially noteworthy because unlike in U.S. where DVD and other home entertainment constitues more than 50% of a film's revenue while box office accounts for 30%, in China almost 100% of a film's revenue comes from its box office gross (I will update the exact portion from reliable sources later). This increase in tweets shows the great potential for China to start exploring revenues from the after-theatre distributions.
There is a great article that breaks down the revenue components of the major 6 studios in Hollywood. Even though it is written in 2005, but the revenue structure remains similar except for some distribution vehicles went online.
Hollywood's Profits, Demystified - The real El Dorado is TV.
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| The Weibo Search with Keyword "泰囧" (meaning: Lost In Thailand) |
During the time when Tai Jiong was in theaters, people were not just retweeting; they were participating in the film, in advertising the film. Tai Jiong became like Rage Comics and Epic Fail where snapshots of the scenes were taken as picture sets and facial expression that people use to refer to their emotions. Just like when people wanted to say “hell yeah!”, they won’t; they say “true story” with the picture of a man holding cup instead. There were picture generators, and those pictures were everywhere. In fact, they are used widely now – meaning the film has become part of the cyber culture.
An Example of Transforming Into Tai Jiong's Tipping Vehicle(s)
(Secondary Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen)
Take me as an example;
At the early period I could see Tai Jiong
about ten to twenty times a day on my news feed in different social
networks that I go, from different people – mostly from people whom I have
mutual friends with but not familiar. To me, they were the connectors. |
| Effects of acquaintance on Social Networks: CONNECTORS "Don't really know them, but okay I learn what's going on around" |
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| Effect of Closer Friends Posting On Social Network/Word of Mouth = MAVENS "Wow it's good?!" |
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| SALESMAN: FRIENDS |
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| SALESMAN: Legit Critiques/Ratings |
Two Strong Salesmen
A very specific group of salesmen need to be addressed here: Douban and Mtime. Young Chinese people also go to Douban Movies and Mtime for ranking and critics. Those two websites are like the IMDB in China, but Douban is a social network at the same time. A necessary piece of background information is that Douban started out as a base for Xiaoqingxin – meaning “petty burgeois who love literature, music, art, philosophy etc.” – and part of the advantage for this website is they have accumulated and still keep attracting a ton of talented writers who very frequently update in book reviews, arts and film critics. Their users normally do have great taste and offer very insightful, and extensive critics. Because of this and may be because of the often harshness and the bias towards arts rather than commercial films, the average ratings by Douban users and their critics have become an academic and professional flag and quality testing result; therefore they are mostly in the role of the salesman, or a maven to some. |
| On Douban Movie's (The Chinese IMDb) Lost In Thailand page: Surprisingly the "petty art lovers" leniently gave a 7.8 overall score to the film - which is extremely high comparing to other big or small budget films. There are 129,524 short reviews and 1,907 pieces of criques 549 pieces of critiques rated the film 5 stars (extremely recommend);673 critiques rated 4 stars (recommend); only 450 rated 3 stars (not bad) ; 230 pieces of critiques rated below 3 stars (poorly); |
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| On Mtime's Lost in Thailand page, There are 22,870 ratings, 14,714 "Want to watch!", 1,865 "Add to favorites" and 1,802 pieces of critiques that referred to this film |
The reason to classify them as a salesman is that people go to these sites to be convinced. Most people are still not active in their platform, but at some point when they are in the process discussed in the last paragraph, they are interested now but they won’t make their decision. Almost whenever they want to make a decision about which movie they should see or if they should see a film, they would simply go to Douban, type the name, look at the score, and skim through the most popular positive and/or negative critics, and then the most trembling moment of the filmmakers: they just make their decisions, like that. Mtime is similar but different, overall not as influential in decision-making.
VIRAL PICTURES - PHENOMENON ESTABLISHED
However, in the meanwhile, a group of “viral” funny pictures appeared. Everyone started to speak not about but with those pictures. For easier comparison, still take me as the example, I started to see not just the word Tai Jiong but part of the film itself fifty times a day – not as a part of their updates about personal life, but just as a part of any conversation. The previous roles also change. These pictures are connectors to many people, mavens to some, and salesmen to others; most importantly, these existences do not even aim to market for the film. That is when people are least vigilant and most curious and acceptive; and this effect is equal to that of a salesman. The marketing campaign then became a national movement where almost everyone was involved. |
| A google search on "Tai Jiong Style": the "Rage Comic" kind of viral screenshots from the film that internet users use to express emotions |
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| One of the many "Tai Jiong Style" generators online: http://kuang.2weima.com/taijiong/This picture went viral with several mimics such as this picture: (used for irony, in the original film the character Lang threw away his phone with GPS tracker set by his rival but this guy went all the way to "return" the phone Lang wants to get rid of) "Went to work for five days? Thought it's Friday right? It's Wednesday today hahahahahaha!" |
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