Case study
A Box Office Success
Expertise
Visual Design, Advertising
Platforms
Social, Web, Email, Print
Role
Design Lead
Year
2018
Intro
As the design lead for John Travolta’s “Gotti”, I was responsible for designing the look-and-feel of content used on social, web, print, and email throughout the whole campaign.
0% Rotten Tomatoes to Box Office Gold
We had a movie we knew audiences would love, but critics would hate, so we had to protect our film’s reputation while also engaging audiences and promoting the film.
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We launched a comprehensive large-scale integrated marketing campaign across multiple forms of media to make the theatrical opening of Gotti as successful as possible.
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Here is the case study video I created highlighting all the work my team and I did for Gotti.Â
I created the digital ads that were used across paid media, social, email, print, and web.
A video that went viral
Our team strategized to capitalize on the power of virality in social media by creating a video response to the critics’ negative reviews. In order to communicate our messaging, our team created a video for social media asking consumers who they trust, themselves or “a troll behind a keyboard.” We completely changed the existing narrative by taking the mobster mentality behind the film and using it to our advantage. This attitude was an effective marketing tool, as it tied in the film’s messaging.
What made our video stand out among the rest and go viral was our ability to turn a negative situation into a positive one. With all the unfavorable press surrounding the Gotti release, our team put together a one-of-a-kind approach to turn our audience’s attention away from the media and towards the movie itself. Through the use of video, we were able to directly call out the critics in a playful manner and pivot the conversation in our favor.
I created a viral video that millions viewed.
Turning a negative into a positive
With $0 in media buy, we cleverly got critics to spread the word about our video and the film by them organically responding to the content. We knew the critics would react personally either in offense or jest to the video’s message and would express their reaction publicly, thus unwittingly giving the video a boost in national coverage – major publications that negatively reviewed the film covered the release of the video, which brought more attention to the film.
Results?
In effect, we got other people to promote our film for us, empowering audiences over critics. This led to a complete change in the narrative which resulted in us retaining all of our screens going into a second weekend (unheard of for a 0% movie), and delivered a profit to the film’s distributor.
