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Teen Drama Marketing Strategies

Social Media is one of the most effective and popular marketing strategies when marketing a Teen Drama film or television programme. For the first time Channel 4 chose to use social networking site ‘MySpace’ to market and promote the launch of popular, British teen drama series ‘Skins’ in 2007.

“Everybody believes there is a relationship between social media and ratings, but it is not at all clear what it is. In the U.K., 5% of the population use social media to talk about TV in any month.”- Dan Brooke, Channel 4 Marketing Director.

In 2012 Channel 4 launched a social campaign to promote the sixth series of ‘Skins’, using popular social networking sites ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’. Using Facebook and Twitter character profiles and accounts will be created for each of the show’s characters ,which will enable them to interact with fans by posting comments, pictures and Youtube videos. The idea of the campaign is that is acts as an ‘interactive extension’ of the show for fans, by acting as a reminder for fans as news of the show is posted in their Facebook and Twitter feeds. Activity surrounding the show from various social media sites will then be pulled together to feature on one dedicated website. According to Tamar’s digital marketing director Henry Elliss , social media has become the best way to target the 16-24 age demographic.

“ As well as allowing for the sort of interaction and viral-spread that the traditional campaigns didn’t, it makes most sense-advertising in a subtle way in their own ‘natural environment’. Very little effort required by the audience with maximum connection to their social graph and network”. – Henry Elliss

For series 2-4 of Skins, Holler a creative agency became involved with the hit teen drama series to create an ‘online buzz’ surrounding the show. Holler achieved this by creating an online community through exclusive deals and various media partners.

A three minute trailer of a Skins party scene got 250,000 views, and 5,000 friends that became a part of the online community used the Skins promo banner as their background for their own profile.

To help promote the fifth series of Skins, Channel 4 created a website that focused on the fictional college that the characters attended, ‘Roundview College’. The website allowed the audience to watch video clips of future storylines and communicate with the characters.

“I think other shows will see this and decide to give it a go themselves-the intrigue and cliff hangers obviously lend themselves well to drama, though there’s certainly scope for sitcoms or more niche shows to try this themselves”. –Henry Elliss.

American teen drama series ‘Pretty Little Liars’ launched the online campaign, ‘#TheBetrAyel’ after it was revealed the one of the characters from the show would be “guilty of the ultimate betrayel”. Using the hashtag, fans would be able to speculate online as to who they thought was guilty. Fans could also use the ‘#TheBetrAyelSuspectTracker’ app which was active to use on social media site ‘Facebook’ and abcfamily.com. The app allowed fans to view conversations about various characters by clicking on the character’s picture icon. During the finale there were 36,000 tweets being tweeted per minute.

Online teen drama series ‘Sofia’s Diary’ that is shown through social networking site ‘Bebo’ chose to partner up with Unilever’s ‘Sure Girl’ deodrant, in order to help promote the Unilever product. Character’s from ‘Sofia’s Diary’ will be seen using the Sure Girl deodrant to help the Unilever company target teenage audiences with their product.

Ellie Goulding’s music video ‘I Know You Care’ was used to market teen drama film ‘Now Is Good’. The music video shows Ellie Goulding sitting in a room alone, whilst the rest of the video includes clips from the film where Dakota Fanning’s character, ‘Tessa’ and the male protagonist ‘Adam’ are seen falling for each other. As the song progresses, clips of Tessa’s deteriorating health are shown to the audience.