Douyin Has Become a Key Promotion Platform for Movies
Every year, people are curious to see what movies will be on air during the Spring Festival and how the box office is. 2021 broke the record and achieved 7.8 billion RMB, which is 32.5% growth compared with 2019. Among those CNY movies, both “Hi, Mom” (你好，李焕英) and “Chinatown Detective 3” (唐人街探案3) broke 4 billion RMB at the box office, which got them on the list for the TOP 10 box office hits in China.
Behind these numbers are the high quality of movies, government’s effort in controlling the COVID and the holiday period. Another key reason though, is Douyin. Studios are increasingly using Douyin in a variety of ways to promote movies.
How Does Douyin Promote Movies?
- Douyin gives traffic to celebrities
Many celebrities are joining Douyin for promotion purposes. For example, Liu Dehua (刘德华), a top male actor in China. He joined Douyin on January 17. Five days later, Liu’s Douyin account had 571 million followers and had gained 140 million likes. Insane!
Liu was promoting the movie that he starred in: Endgame (人潮汹涌). One of his videos was giving out free movie tickets and the video gained 5 million likes and 190k comments.
Jia Ling (贾玲) is the movie director of “Hi, Mom”, which is thought to be the Blackhorse this year. Jia joined Douyin in early 2018, but until 2021, she only posted one video. To promote her movie, which she also starred in, she became active on Douyin and posted more than 10 videos.
Another main actress in her movie, Zhang Xiaofei (张小斐), posted 20 videos to promote “Hi, Mom”. In total, her videos received 23 million likes and she now has 6.5 million followers.
When Jia’s team was promoting the movie in different cities, they livestreamed the events. In total, 1.56 million people watched the livestream.
In addition to this kind of livestream, Douyin’s official movie account “抖音电影” (Douyin Movie) had livestreams for “Endgame” and “Hi, Mom”. On the livestream, the actors and actresses were giving out free movie tickets or discounts to the audience.
2. Douyin top KOLs film content with main actors & actresses
For example, when “Hi, Mom” launched, top Douyin account @疯产姐妹 (Broken Sisters) published a video with Jia Lin and Zhang Xiaofei. The video had 3.8 million likes and 132k comments.
3. Douyin encourages users to create related content
Once the movie “Chinatown Detective 3” was in theaters, many viewers were discussing with each other on Douyin who is Q? Q is a secret character that didn’t show up in the end of the movie.
For “Hi, Mom”, they designed a Douyin filter which puts a users’ face as the mom character in the movie. The filter has been used by more than 400M Douyin users.
Back to 2017, when another popular movie The Ex-File 3: The Return of The Exes (前任3) was on air, many users changed its classic scenes, for example, the female character eating mango or the male character dressing to be Joker (至尊宝). Users changed those scenes and had themselves as the main characters.
Users Can Also Watch Movies on Douyin
Other than promoting movies, since last year’s COVID quarantine, Bytedance has started airing movies on Douyin and its other video app Watermelon Video (西瓜视频).
Last year, when people were not able to go to movie theatres, Douyin aired a new CNY movie called Lost in Russia (囧妈). SInce then, Douyin has provided nearly 100 movies for users to watch for free.
Douyin also uses movies to drive traffic to Watermelon Video by showing the first 6 minutes or so on Douyin and then if people want to continue, they have to become a Watermelon Video VIP user.
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