Regal Cinemas YouTube Series Makes Movies at Home Unappealing

To help Regal Cinemas combat all the other ways consumers have to watch movies, digital agency Something Massive created a YouTube series, Date Night Fails, which uses Vine talent to target 18-to-34-year-olds and focus on how the theater experience is superior.

Launched on October 29 and housed on the Regal Cinemas YouTube channel, Date Night Fails features a young man who tries to impress his dates with “home-grown cinematics,” but instead repeatedly showcases the “amazing Regal experience his friends and dates are missing,” the brand says.

It stars so-called Vine celebrity Jason Nash and “a slew of young Vine talent,” including Brittany Furlan, KC James and Arielle Vandenberg.

Nash wrote each episode and selected other Vine influencers that would be good talent to have in each episode, says Something Massive Founder Rebecca Coleman.

The first season of the series includes five videos: Loading, Spoiler Alert, Driven to Distraction, Lesser Movie Titles and Making Concessions.

Coleman says the brand “used a Netflix model” and “released all five at once” because “we found looking at past releases of episodic content that the first does well and others have half the viewership. This way, you can go right to next one and binge watch the way the model for Netflix is set up.”

Viewership numbers range from about 30,000 to 70,000 as of November 10.

Regal plans to release a new series of videos in 2014, Coleman says.

Something Massive turned to YouTube for the campaign because it wanted messaging with a longer shelf life than Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram, Coleman says.

“Something that came to light very quickly was stats on how brands perform on YouTube,” she says. “We saw brands reporting 30 percent of views on videos happening up to 52 weeks after the initial post happened.”

That’s in part how the agency hatched the idea of an evergreen YouTube series.

“The idea obviously had to be around the experience unique to Regal rather than what movies are there right at this moment, so we focused on how the theater experience is different than at home,” Coleman says. “That’s their biggest competition — all of the options consumers have to watch movies and be entertained outside the theater.”

As a result, Something Massive developed a program that focused on relatable experiences like technical difficulties or unfamiliar movie titles.

Coleman says the agency tapped Vine celebs in order to make the series “interesting and relatable and kind of of-the-moment.”

These Vine users, in turn, promote the series themselves with branded Vine videos, Instagram photos and tweets.

Regal is also promoting the series on its social media platforms and with episode-specific hashtags.

Regal Cinemas has 2.4 million likes and 101,000 followers.

“This campaign showcases a shared love for filmmaking between our brand and our Vine stars, and it brings Regal Cinemas to life cross-platform. We’re excited about driving new audiences to our unmatched experience,” said Chris Sylvia, director of digital marketing at Regal, in a prepared statement.

A Regal rep was not available for further comment.

Regal says it operates 7,334 screens in 575 theatres in 42 states along with Guam, Saipan, American Samoa and the District of Columbia as of September 26, 2013.