Advertising Marketing PR, Movie Marketing

Social Engagement Isn’t a Measure of The Peanuts Movie’s Partner Success

There’s a story in Adweek about how the social marketing for The Peanuts Movie didn’t generate much in the way of engagement. Specifically, the promotions for the movie from corporate partners were all over the place but all that content on social media didn’t result in much audience engagement with the exception of things like sweepstakes and other tactics like that. The conclusion is that because the audience for The Peanuts Movie was older, with more of an emphasis on nostalgia, that lack of engagement is the result of a generational divide as compared with something like Minions from earlier this year.

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(Let’s not focus on how the story is trying to draw an apples-to-apples comparison and then states that it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison because the two movies had different target audiences. Not going to focus too much on that at all.)

The presumption seems to be that because these promotions didn’t create lots of engagement with the audience these cross-promotions were a failure. But is that accurate? Only within the narrow view of social media marketers.

The Peanuts Movie has grossed $82mm to date as of this past weekend and has been the #2 movie each of the two weekends it’s been in theaters. It is, by just about any measure, a success. And part of that success reasonably has to be attributed to the promotional partners and their activity on paid, earned, shared and owned channels.

If you’re only gauging a campaign’s success based on social engagement it likely means that’s the most important metric you’re tracking. That’s a very limited view, though. While engagement is valuable to be sure, it is also pretty insular. Engagement stats can be used to gauge program health, so maybe these stats are used by the Peanuts’ promotional partners the next time they’re doing something like this to say they’ll only do two Facebook posts as opposed to five posts.

Overall, though, the success of the partnerships need be measured by real results. Did the co-branded packaging result in an uptick of Little Debbie snack cakes? Did the partner companies see additional fan acquisition from the sweeps? And most importantly, did all of this result in an appreciable number of tickets for the movie being sold

Again, engagement is a good metric, but it’s primarily useful within the narrow confines of the social media program and those numbers should be used to gauge the tactics for that program. But using social media engagement as a measure of whether or not a big campaign like this is or isn’t a success is putting a lot more pressure on that Like button than is reasonable or justifiable.

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