The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Twitter’s New Marketing Pitch to Studios
Disney, Warner Bros. and Sony are trying out promotion of tentpole movies on accounts run and managed by the social media giant — for free, with a catch
In late October, Twitter and Warner Bros. unveiled their #DuneWeek marketing campaign to drum up fan excitement around the star-studded sci-fi film hitting theaters and HBO Max on Oct. 22, with nearly the whole cast participating. But these interactions weren’t happening on a Warner Bros. or HBO Max Twitter account. Instead, original content for #DuneWeek took place on the Twitteroperated @TwitterMovies handle, which has been positioning itself as a prime location for studios to reach audiences, for free, in hopes of winning over studio clients for paid promotions.
By using @TwitterMovies, Warner Bros. was able to leverage the account’s preexisting millions of followers — the handle has been gaining followers since late 2011 — whereas the stand-alone Dune account (143,000 followers) was mainly active starting in 2020. James Brownstein, Twitter’s
head of film partnerships, notes that “when we partner on an organic content campaign on @ TwitterMovies that performs really well, it reminds advertisers how important our platform is for reaching an audience who will buy movie tickets or subscriptions.” At the end of 2021, other major marketing blitzes original to the @TwitterMovies handle included promos from The Matrix Resurrections, Spider-Man: No Way Home and West Side Story.
Dustin Sandoval, vp digital marketing at Disney Studios, tells THR that the @TwitterMovies and @TwitterTV accounts allow Disney to reach a more general audience that might not already be following brands like Marvel (13.3 million followers) and Pixar (11.8 million followers) on Twitter.
“Working with that handle gives us an opportunity to reach a little bit further and potentially even a broader audience, knowing that we still have millions of millions of fans on our @MarvelStudios handle, big Marvel’s handle,” Sandoval says. “But @TwitterMovies is movie fans, so we can reach a nice general audience of just people who are all loving the same thing and expose them to some of the stuff that we’re doing.”