Digital Tracking: ‘Age of Adaline’ Eyes a Successful Start

Does digital data offer indicators that can be used to monitor marketing effectiveness and predict box office success even before awareness turns into intent? Moviepilot — which studies social data and box office trends — analyzes this weekend’s new movies across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google (the methodology behind the numbers is laid out in the appendix below) over the seven days leading up to their release, when marketing campaigns should be at their peak.

“The Age of Adaline,” Lionsgate
Moviepilot Prediction: $13.5 million

“The Age of Adaline” waltzes in this weekend to sweep older female audiences off their feet. Turnout should be strong, as “Adaline” is uncomfortably squashed between “Furious 7,” the juggernaut that keeps on rolling, and imminent super-sequel “Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

The digital marketing has played off the movie’s plot with a beautiful Tumblr documenting Adaline through the ages and a Pinterest campaign that tells the visual history of changing fashion through the decades, as well as nine makeup and fashion tutorials with YouTubers such as Teni Panosian, one for each decade covered in the movie. There’s been strong outreach to moms over Twitter, appealing to the Noah Calhoun (of “The Notebook”) in all of us, plus a very strong Instagram campaign that has seen more than 30,000 followers built on the official account.

Older audiences are showing strong interest in “The Age of Adaline,” driving a high search volume, twice as high as that for “The Longest Ride,” which recently opened to $13 million. Tweet volume, however, suggests younger women are proving harder to persuade, with “Adaline” at around half the volume of “The Duff” and “The Longest Ride.” Balancing both metrics against each other sees “Adaline” headed for around $13 million-$14 million.

“Little Boy,” Open Road
Moviepilot Prediction: $4 million

“Little Boy” is opening in many theaters this weekend, but the big winner could be A24’s “Ex Machina,” which is expanding wide after racking up massive per-theater averages in limited release.

Faith-based movies are tricky to predict from social metrics as they often employ strong grassroots campaigns, which means their box office outstrips their digital performance. Last year, “Son of God” opened to $25.6 million, and “Heaven Is for Real” made $22.5 million with fewer than 10 million trailer views and 50,000 tweets each.

Comparing “Little Boy” to those two movies would see it coming in with around $4 million-$5 million, which would be no surprise since the trailer has an additional 1.5 million views on Facebook alone.

Tobias Bauckhage (@tbauckhage) is co-founder and CEO of moviepilot.com, a social-media-driven movie community reaching more than 29 million Facebook fans and 30 million monthly unique users. Based on community data, Moviepilot helps studios to optimize their social media campaigns, identifying, analyzing and activating the right audiences. The company works with studios like Sony, 20th Century Fox and A24.

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Appendix

Facebook fan (or like) numbers are a good indicator for fan awareness for a movie, even months before the release. For mainstream movies with younger target audiences, fan counts are particularly important. However, big fan numbers can be bought and movies with older target audiences typically have lower fan counts. Fan engagement measured by PTAT (People Talking About This) is a more precise but also a fickle indicator, heavily driven by content strategy and media spending. Both numbers are global and public facing numbers from the official Facebook fanpage.

YouTube trailer counts are important for measuring early awareness about a movie. We track all English language original video content about the movie on YouTube, down to videos with 100 views, whether they are officially published by a studio or published unofficially by fans. The Buzz ratio looks at the percentage of unique viewers on YouTube that have “liked” a video and given it a “thumbs up”. Movies with over 40 million views are usually mainstream and set to dominate the box office, while titles drawing around 10 million indicate a more specific audience. If a movie does not have a solid number of trailer views on YouTube four weeks before its release, it is not promising news. But again, it is important to understand whether trailer views have been bought or grew organically. These numbers are global and public facing.

Twitter is a good real-time indicator of excitement and word of mouth, coming closer to release or following bigger PR stunts. Mainstream, comedy and horror titles all perform particularly strongly on Twitter around release. We count all tweets over the period of the last seven days before release (Friday through Thursday), that include the movie’s title plus a number of search words, e.g. “movie” OR a list of movie-specific hashtags. The numbers are global, conducted using a Twitter API partner service.

Search is a solid indicator for intent moving towards release as people actively seek out titles that they are aware of and are thinking about seeing. Search is particularly significant for fan-driven franchises and family titles as parents look for information about films they may take their children to see. We look at the last seven days (Friday through Thursday) of global Wikipedia traffic as a conclusive proxy for Google Search volume. We have to consider that big simultaneous global releases tend to have higher search results compared to domestic releases.

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