Baaghi 2 release: Fox Star Studios harnesses chatbots to engage audiences

That digital is the buzzword is not news anymore. Having said that, marketers are still scratching their heads over the use of the platform to advertise their products or services. Film marketing, which has been pretty run-of-the-mill, grapples with the same challenge. 

Fox Star Studios, the Indian arm of Murdoch's 20th Century Fox, is attempting to innovate on the virtual platform to engage audiences. 

Starting with Baaghi 2 (release date March 30),the studio is using chatbots and gamificafion as parts of its film marketing strategy. 

"With digital, we have the scope to access a lot of data. For the first time perhaps, we can track the consumer journey (of their interaction with the film) from the first point  of contact to the purchase of ticket," says Shikha Kapur, chief marketing officer, FSS. 

Marketers are fast realising that likes and shares cannot always be the metric for effeciency of communication reach. There is therefore an attempt, across sectors, to use digital marketing going beyond likes, shares and retweets in order to gauge the stickiness of the content. This can be done by creating a two way communication path, rather than just bombarding viewers with videos and other promotional material and actually talking to them. Digital provides the avenue to do so. 

For the marketing for Baaghi 2 on digital, the team at FSS went back to the drawing board. The first task was to identify the audience loyal to the franchise." We shortlisted fans of action films, those who have seen Baaghi 1 and fans of Tiger Shroff. This was the audience we went after even in case of the promo release. I think our research gave us a catchment of 60-70 million digital audience," Kapur explains. 

The targeted release of the promo online paid of in that the bounce rate on the promo was considerably lower. In other words, 50 per cent of the viewers clicking on the promo video saw it till the end. The end of the promo included a call to action for interested viewers to interact with the film online. A number flashed on the screen, giving a missed call to which would initiate a conversation with the FSS Hindi chatbot on the Facebook Messenger platform. 

Once on the chatbot, fans can interact with the movie through conversations that include trivia, quizzes and tasks. The gamification aspect comes from the awards linked with the tasks. Each task has points attached to it, which users can accrue over time. As the fan moves up on the leaderboard, they collect rewards which can be redeemed as per their convenience.

Kapur says that the strategy has paid off in that the chatbot has seen traction and is engaging fans of the franchise. "In the run up to the release of the film, we'll ramp up the engagement and try and be part of the process of conversion (when the person actually makes the ticket person). It's the first time we've done something like this and we hope to adapt the chatbot to other titles which lend themselves well to digital engagement." 

The strategy will be employed future titles from the FSS banner, and may even include language dubs of the Hollywood titles the studio distributes in India