Our Work
Hollywood.com Top 5
Background
Hollywood.com is one of the leading movie-related sites on the Internet, featuring over one million pages of in-depth movie information, including photos and reviews, showtime listings, entertainment news, and an extensive multimedia library. The site boasts a well-established visitor base, with approximately one billion annual impressions.
In the summer of 2008, Hollywood.com tasked Buddy Media with creating a social media application that would leverage the website’s massive open web audience to drive advocacy of the company’s brand. Buddy Media promised an engaging app-vertisement designed to deliver social brand advocates who would evangelize the brand through frequent activity on the Hollywood.com social media application.
Objectives
- Build an engaging social app-vertisement to leverage pre-existing brand recognition on both Facebook and MySpace
- Deliver a loyal audience of social brand advocates by driving thousands of unique visitors to the Hollywood.com Top 5 Facebook application
Solution
Buddy Media conceptualized and developed the Hollywood.com Top 5 application to build a loyal audience of brand advocates across the two largest social networks in the United States. The app-vertisement was a graphical film survey with a social twist. Users were tasked with voting on their ‘Top 5’ favorite films and stars across a variety of categories and themes. After each survey was completed, the application displayed overall voting across the entire social network audience, as well as comparisons to the results generated by the user’s friends. This social comparison functionality spurred massive viral growth, as social network users were motivated to share the application with friends to gauge their tastes in films and Hollywood stars.
Hollywood.com Top 5 was one of the first app-vertisements to be rolled out across multiple social networks. Buddy Media’s development team worked tirelessly to ensure that the application took advantage of all social integration points on both MySpace and Facebook. This was a challenge considering that each network operates with an independent development platform with completely disparate programming languages. In addition to the development of the app-vertisement, Buddy Media spread the brand’s messaging across the social graph through a highly targeted Facebook marketing campaign. Thousands of consumers used the Hollywood.com application as a conduit to the corporate website.
