The Content Marketing Behind Fifty Shades Of Grey’s Box Office Success
Whether you love it, hate it, or love to hate it, there’s no doubt that Fifty Shades of Grey is a viral content sensation. Since Random House acquired the rights to the series in 2012, Fifty Shades of Grey has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.
To put that into literary sensation perspective, Stieg Larson’s bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo took four years to sell 20 million copies!
While critics of the book series had fun predicting the film adaptation’s eminent failure, its ultimate box office success is attributed in large part to major marketing push that accompanied the strategic decision to bump the premiere from August 2014 to Valentine’s Day weekend 2015.
The February 13th premiere set a new Valentine’s Day record with a massive $94.4 million domestic debut over the four-day weekend. Those numbers set Fifty Shades apart as the biggest February film debut in history, stealing the top spot from 2004’s The Passion of the Christ. (For more box office nerdery, check out ‘Grey’ Makes Green Over Valentine’s Day Weekend from Box Office Mojo, or my personal favorite headline, How Fifty Shades of Grey is bigger than Jesus courtesy of Fortune.)
Given the massive international audience for the Fifty Shades series, Universal Studios faced both the luxury of a built-in audience and the high-expectations that come from a loyal fan base. But the Fifty Shades marketing team didn’t just sit back and let the racy series sell itself.
Using the TrackMaven platform, here’s a look behind the content marketing plays that built hype and drove ticket sales in advance of the premiere.
On Twitter, the official Fifty Shades account didn’t see its largest spike the night of its premiere, but rather two weeks before on Super Bowl Sunday (2/1/15).
In fact, the film’s interactions on Twitter were 35% higher on Super Bowl Sunday than on its February 13th premiere.
The top-performing tweets from the film’s Twitter account on Super Bowl Sunday all paired some of the book’s most memorable lines with the film’s steamy trailer — plus a direct link to ticket pre-sales on Fandango:
What is it about elevators? Get tickets: http://t.co/6ISOttr3bI #FiftyShades https://t.co/Hp4sDxhvm3
— Fifty Shades of Grey (@FiftyShades) February 2, 2015
The tweet above, for example, saw 21,600 interactions, four times greater than the @FiftyShades Twitter account’s average!
The account even links directly to the film’s Fandango page in its Twitter bio:
Universal Studios also leveraged the film’s not-quite-safe-for-work, mega-viral gifs on its official Tumblr account, which averaged nearly 2,000 notes per post in February 2015.
Again, on this channel there was a major push for ticket pre-sales in the weeks leading up to the premiere, with an especially large surge in content on January 27th: On Pinterest, however, the film took a tamer, more romance-oriented approach. Take the Pin below, which raked in four times more that the film’s average interactions per Pin:
In terms of Fifty Shades‘ social audience growth, however, Instagram is the big channel winner. In the first few weeks of February 2015 alone, the film’s Instagram account grew a whopping 32.35%. The film’s Twitter audience saw the second-largest increase in followers with 24.03% growth.
For more movie marketing insights, stay tuned for our analysis of the 87th Annual Academy Awards next week!
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
