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Promotion of the screen-life series for Bazelevs production company

«Bazelevs» is Russia’s biggest production company. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted, Ben-Hur, and Searching. Escape from Hell were filmed in this company as well as Alisa Knows What Will Happen! series.

«Bazelevs» ordered us to promote a spinoff of the animated series Alisa Knows What to Do! Now it's a screenlife series.

Description

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Goals

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Run the pilot season and work through the promotion hypotheses
The series includes 15 episodes, 5 to 6 minutes each. It’s important to watch the audience response to the screenlife format and the entire product, to select the most effective promotion tools and mechanisms.
Get the organic traffic
We optimized videos to receive the maximum organic coverage. We developed a formula for us to forecast the detailed YouTube channel traffic flow from integrations with Influencers.

Make a case for advertisers
The series had a second season planned with a full-scale advertising campaign. Ad integrations were needed for production and start-up.
Make friends with the audience
For the further commercial success of the project, we needed to build a community of friends and fans of the series.

Generating a content concept and do social media promotion

Starting up the advertising campaigns

Running the collaborations

Content production

Forming a summary to attract advertisers

Tasks

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Generating the creatives for new sections of the series

Optimizing content for organic search

For Alisa Knows What Will Happen! series, we made a separate YouTube channel and a social network. In Instagram and VK, we held interactives, contacted young audiences, and shared new episode announcements.

We started from scratch

The protagonist of the series is an 11-year old boy called Misha Druzhnov. To make young viewers feel for Misha, we made his own channels in VK, Instagram, TikTok, Likee. The protagonist communicated with his young fans out of the plot.

We integrated the protagonist

Or two major strategies. We were communicating in the channels of the series and in “Misha’s” accounts. We discussed conflicts in the new episodes, and mems for it with viewers.

Along with new episodes, we posted digests — videos where Misha and Alisa discussed the relevant weekly news. This way, we have aligned ourselves to the internal agenda, breaking the “fourth wall” in front of the viewers.

We designed and realized the content strategy

Quality traffic to the accounts and its conversion into the involved audience was our main goal.

We run the advertising campaigns

Implementation Steps

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This is how the news digests looked. We chose relevant current topics for them

This is how we kept the excitement between episodes.

Before the New Year, we even held a live broadcast with the protagonist!

Some reactions from the comments

Using the concept of the series and the right line of communication, we got such messages from little fans day after day

What’s about ads?

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Regarding the test campaign results, we selected key audience segments

Viewers of relevant YouTube channels

Visitors to relevant VK publishers

The audience with the following preferences: entertainment, series, and animated series

Viewers, highly involved in the advertised content

Since we were promoting the pilot, the advertising budget was limited. But we managed to exceed the KPIs without a large-scale campaign:

We ran ads in Discovery Ads
Already in the first ads we confirmed our hypothesis: cold traffic is poorly engaged in this format. Therefore, we proceeded to steps 2 and 3, which subsequently "warmed up" the audience and led to a 5-fold decrease in the cost per subscriber.
We started collaborating with micro-influencers
In this case “micro” refers to the age as well 🙂 We purchased the advertising from the youngest bloggers and won the bombastic reaction: new followers and viewers below the market price, hundreds of comments, likes, and messages to “Misha”.

We supported the integration of Viki Show in the series
Viki is one of the most popular CIS bloggers with 9M+ subscribers. We realized that mentioning the girl in the last episode of a season will increase views (up to ~ 500K).

For children to watch the series until the end, we used a trick: we didn’t tell when exactly the Viki Show would show up in the series. As a result, the audience watched through it all — and the traffic took off as a shuttle.

It’s important to know that these results are achieved with the intention not to mention the blogger in the metadata to keep the balance of views in the first season.