Case Study: VML Qais plays with Facebook Timeline to promote MIB3 in Singapore

Background
In the run-up to the launch of MIB3, Sony Pictures Singapore tasked its social media agency, VML Qais with getting Sony's Facebook fans on board and ready for the show. Just one problem, since the launch of FB's Timeline, eye-tracking studies have shown that users do not engage with a page's content nearly as much as they used to. They tend to look at the branding assets (cover photo, app thumbnails and profile picture) much more. Generally speaking, Facebook users rarely re-visit a Facebook brand page once they have Liked it. Most engagement happens in NewsFeed.

"Generally, Singaporean fans on Facebook are not as engaged as fans in say, Indonesia or India," Duane Melius, social media manager at VML Qais told Campaign Asia-Pacific. "In terms of engagement, they’ll like a page but they won’t engage with it much. We had to devise a campaign that would encourage our fans to interact and spread the word about the movie." 

Aim
The aim was to gamify Facebook’s Timeline feature, exploiting it in a fun and entertaining way so that users could better engage and interact with the content. The campaign gave consumers an incentive to delve into the Sony Pictures Singapore Timeline and experience much more content.

Execution
The campaign started with the call to action, ‘The Men In Black Want You’ on the Sony Pictures Singapore Facebook page, featuring the iconic still image of the movie’s three main stars.

Clicking 'Like' gave fans access to a hunt for clues across time, mirroring the movie’s storyline in which J ‘timejumps’ back to meet partner K in his younger years. By manipulating the page’s Facebook timeline, fans embarked on Missions like #1 ‘Locate Jeffrey the worm’.

"In essence, we had our fans on a treasure hunt through the Timeline, with some picking up random rewards and new clues generated every day," explained Melius. 

The first instruction: “You must TIME JUMP to 1 July 1997 for the first clue. Go!” led fans on a hunt culminating in the location of the alien and a surprise for the most engaged fans. Five such missions were set during a two-week period from 7 to 17 May 2012.

Results
Gamifying Timeline created the highest levels of engagement ever on the Sony Pictures Singapore Facebook page. Content for MIB3 on the page saw an increase in virality, the highest peaked at 23.53 per cent, with a peak in reach at 264,256 (an approximately 5100 per cent jump from the page norm).

When each alien was found, fans posted lengthy and interactive comments, an average of 32 comments during the campaign period per alien. There were a total of 163 comments generated. Overall, the campaign alone generated 1,026 ‘people talking about’ which is the metric for shares, likes and comments.