CINEFIL CO. AND “RENT-A-CAT” CAMPAIGN

The first year of Distribution 2.0 is almost over and now it is time to take a look back to everything that was done and achieved during these intense 12 months.

Our partners all over the world have started collecting their experiences throughout this past year, so that we can start sharing the knowledge we have acquired after putting all our strategies into action. Here you can have an insight of some of the experiences gathered by our partner in Hungary: Cinefil Co.

Cinefil Co.. took part of the project with three films: RENT A CAT, NO and AI WEIWEI. They developed a tailored distribution and marketing strategy for each one of them and achieved quite different results.

RENT A CAT (by Naoko Ogigami) is a Japanese comedy about a woman who rents cats to people that are in need of companion. The goal was to position the film within the pet lover community and more specifically within the cat lover community, with the hope to turn RENT A CAT into the hungarian Christmas prestent to those who were in need for love. Therefore Cinefil Co. developed a cat-based campaign with a series of actions:

• screenings for cats
• feed-a-cat donation campaign (organized cat galas whose tickets supported civil bodies)
• cat galas with a third of the ticket price donated to charity
• cat costume + cat video + street-art campaign
• cooperation with pet-sites and petfood wholesalers (Royal Canin)

They had to face some difficulties when dealing with the animals implicated in some of the actions as they didn’t arrive on time for the cat screenings (animals are sometimes unpredictable). There were also some missunderstandings with the pet sites that hindered the boost in ticket sales that they expected to achieve through the cooperation with them. It wasn’t possible to make a day and date release either as the Japanese licensor didn’t approve it, although it could have helped to reach a secondary target group which were the japanese culture lovers, who are very active in the net.

However the cooperation with the civil associations turned out to be a twofold success. On the one hand they got the knowledge of the possibilities of advertisment of a cause-related campaign (which have shown themselves as very suitable in order to reach audience for films of special interest) and on the other hand they managed to successfully position the film among the pet lovers and people that felt identified with the characters of the movie (lonely old women showed up in big numbers in the afternoons turning RENT A CAT the sweet favorite of arthouse cinemas within the mentioned time frame).

All in all they achieved to equal the results of Naoko Ogigami’s previous work, MEGANE:

• 1093 admissions in 36 screenings.
  
• date of release: December 27th, 2012
  

Below, some visual examples of the actions for the campaign:

SCREENINGS FOR CATS:

STREET ART CAMPAIGN:

FEED A CAT CAMPAIGN:

https://www.facebook.com/magyarhangya/app_348894098542005

ARTWORK BY HUNGARIAN ARTIST:

CAT COSTUME: