Why Flicks built its first TV campaign around moviegoers spoilt for choice

Starting life as purely a cinema offering, Flicks quickly realised the need, and opportunity, to add streaming as the pandemic hit and cinemas went into hibernation. Now the streaming and cinema recommendation site is looking to expand its reach to wider audiences.

Recently releasing its first TV commercial, it was an easy choice to tap Kiwi talent, comedian and film-maker, Tom Furniss, for the creative. Based out of New Zealand, but launching in the UK, Flicks wanted the ad to take a humorous look at a universal customer pain point: Finding something to watch in a sea of possibilities.  

“The market’s becoming much more fragmented with the likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime, it’s content overload. So that's where we step in and can solve that issue of content overload,” Flicks marketing lead, Tina Chou, told CMO. 

Although Flicks has listings and trailers, the site really aims to differentiate itself by publishing well-written reviews from a line-up of experienced film and TV critics. With the streaming market bulging with so many different offerings from studios and platforms, Flicks believes it has a stronger proposition to help people find what they like, which naturally suggested itself for TVC.  

“It's really talking to that pain point of almost having too many options. Flicks is a one-stop shop to aggregate all the data out there in terms reviews, ratings, where to watch and what to watch,” Chou said.  

With an app as well as the website, Flicks wants to help people bypass having to do a Google search then go through different cinema websites and film listings to find something to watch. “It’s decreasing the number of steps and saving time,” she said.  

With its sights set on the target markets of Gen Z and Millennials, the TV creative talks to them in a lighthearted way. By focusing on these key target markets, the aim is to also ensure cost efficiencies for media buying aimed at this demographic.  

“We wanted someone who understood humour because that’s our brand persona - fun, colloquial and humorous,” said Chou. “As it's our first proper brand TVC, we're really clear on who our target audience is because they are the ones who are religiously using our product and who keep returning to us. At this initial stage, we wanted to make sure we're zeroing in on that target audience and not going too broad.”  

Three-prong marketing strategy  

Chou explained Flicks’ marketing strategy has three tiers: Brand, performance and retention. The plan now is to adjust the weight of each pillar as it starts to think and plan longer term.  

“Historically, we've been really great at the performance piece. We've collected and generated a lot of monthly returning unique users to our site and our app,” Chou said.  

Looking to the longer term, the business is focusing efforts not just on performance but also retention and the brand piece as well. Chou said Flicks understands people connect with the site rationally, but the goal is to extend that into an emotional connection with audiences.  

“It was picking that universal insight of the pain point of not knowing what to watch that would be the right way to anchor ourselves from a messaging point of view,” she explained.  

The main metrics for the campaign are awareness and reach and the early results are promising. “We started investing heavily in brand last October and we've seen that uplift already.” So far there’s been an uplift in branded search queries also linked to its keywords and Outbrain campaign.  

Like many brands at the moment, Flicks too is struggling with the costs of performance advertising, which are going up across the board. “It’s more expensive to reach potential customers, but ultimately the brand layer is us prospecting for future clients. They might not come to us now, but it's all leading up to filling up our cup,” Chou noted.  

“Historically, we’ve been more focused on performance, but we felt it's the balance of all three of those layers - one can't exist without the other. Performance is results today, while brand is results tomorrow. So it definitely is nice to have a balance of both.”  

Flicks has quite a rigorous testing kind of framework to which it’s testing two main things. One is audience, while the second is creative. Creative is the asset itself as well as copy with nuances for different sub-groups within the target audience. A specific audience testing framework is running in March to help uncover certain insights and hypothesis against what Flicks was trying to test.  

Chou saw this as a way of putting into practice the marketing ethos of continual testing and learning, no matter how established the brand is. “As marketers, we have a hypothesis about the brand and what we want to achieve, but it’s always testing something first on a smaller scale, getting the learnings and then optimising,” she added.