5 days into the Sundance Movie Pageant, the Sundance Institute added 25,000 new Instagram followers, bringing its complete to 510,000 as of as we speak.
The 2024 pageant wrapped up on the finish of January, and its advertising and marketing leaders informed ADWEEK that proper now, the stakes really feel excessive. The pageant faces an existential menace as its loyal base ages, and so it’s embraced a advertising and marketing transformation to encourage model loyalty from millennials and Gen Z.
Its 2023 pageant was the primary time the Sundance Institute realized it had vital traction with individuals between 18 and 34. Since Robert Redford based the Sundance Institute in 1981, the nonprofit has subsided with small advertising and marketing budgets. It’s completely different now that it finds itself advertising and marketing to new audiences. The hurdle has Sundance Institute’s advertising and marketing chief and its company associate launching new social methods and tossing out the years-old processes that slowed issues down.
“That subsequent aspiring class of filmmakers that Sundance needs to amplify? These people stay in digital and social channels,” stated Tom Dunlap, chief content material officer at Superbloom, the company associate Sundance Institute labored with this 12 months.
That’s why this 12 months the pageant’s advertising and marketing technique was all about social media. The web technique additionally made sense given the movie business’s enlargement into platforms, influencer offers, branded leisure and extra. It wouldn’t make sense to eschew a social technique when the Institute’s followers are largely content material creators, of varied varieties.
In 2018, on the time Kate Benay accepted a job because the Sundance Institute’s head of selling, the leisure business was already acknowledging its convergence with the broader advertising and marketing and know-how panorama. Extra individuals determine as content material creators or movie fanatics, no matter in the event that they use seize footage with cameras or work with iPhone footage. The streaming giants have been additionally rising, and theatrical attendance was down.
The mission isn’t the pageant’s legacy format. It’s about giving a platform to unbiased movie
By the pandemic’s onset, Benay was two years into her job as advertising and marketing lead, and targeted on altering the Institute’s advertising and marketing technique.
So, when the pageant went digital for the primary time in its historical past, Benay regarded it a catalyst for long-term progress.
“It pressured us to rework our whole enterprise on-line and persuade individuals to, quote unquote, come to the Sundance Movie Pageant, regardless that that will imply sitting in your sofa,” Benay stated.