Short film (shortlist of the 98th Academy Awards): 42,442 reach, $1,110.52 spend

The task

The client is the director of a live-action short film who set out to win an Oscar without a big background in the American film industry. The key decision: tell as much as possible about the film to a narrow audience of US actors and directors.

The main task of the ads: deliver the film’s idea, its production process and excerpts from the picture itself to the narrow audience of people making the key decision (Academy members).

Platform — Meta ads (Instagram and Facebook): mass adoption of the platforms + a strong algorithm for audience selection and delivery distribution. Instagram makes it convenient to show the film and tell about it through different content formats.

What we did

In theory it all sounded simple: segment the audience by interests, pick a narrow geo around Hollywood neighborhoods and launch. In practice:

• the audience by key interests turned out not narrow at all, but included hundreds of thousands of people;
• even with segmentation by narrow districts of central cities (LA and NY) the output was about 250,000 users.

With the available budget, spreading traffic over such a large segment was not an option.

Audience game changer: together with the director we built a base of 500 email addresses of decision-makers. That base was used for the main promotion of the film and for showing all the video materials. Part of the budget was additionally directed at districts where Academy members may also live.

Creatives: about 16 different ad creatives were used over the whole period — trailers, interviews, behind-the-scenes videos, film critics’ comments, carousels, quotes from major media. All content was produced by the film’s team; the agency packaged and adapted it to Instagram ad formats.

Used 3 different ad objectives to engage the full functionality:

• Reach
• Profile visits
• Ad recall

Results

• Spend: $1,110.52
• Ad impressions on the email base: 4,196
• Total reach: 42,442 users
• Page interactions after viewing the ads: 17,971
• Visits to the film’s Instagram profile: 799
• Shares of ad posts: 27

The film made the shortlist of the 98th Academy Awards in the Best Live Action Short Film category.

Insights

• Narrow geo + film-niche interests still yield hundreds of thousands of people — with a small budget for a premium audience that is too broad.
• The decisive move — our own base of decision-makers’ email addresses (500 contacts): precise delivery of all video materials to the right people instead of spreading the budget thin.
• Additional reach was added with geo-targeting on districts where Academy members live.
• ~16 creatives in different formats (trailers, interviews, behind the scenes, critics’ reviews, carousels, media quotes) and 3 ad objectives (reach, profile visits, ad recall) — to engage the full functionality of Meta.
• The project did not advance beyond the shortlist; for a first experience of awards promotion the team was happy with the result.