New Zealand Book Council is a charity dedicated to growing a nation of readers. But encouraging reading in a technology-saturated environment is getting harder, with studies showing that reading rates in year 7 and 8 boys are dropping off rapidly.

Book Council tasked us with helping solve this in young children from low socio-economic backgrounds, particularly Maori and Pasifika boys - by creating true value and enjoyment of reading that can credibly compete with what they currently enjoy.

Research showed that these boys love movies, many of which are based on books. So we created ‘Book Trailers.’

‘Book Trailers’ are beautifully crafted films, designed to hijack movie promotional activity to promote the book that inspired it.

Research shows that books are taking a backseat to activities which offer instant gratification such as gaming, online content and movies.

We needed an innovative way to reach these teenagers so that the humble book could stand up against the alternatives that are not only perceived as more exciting but have financial support that book publishers could only dream of.

From our research groups, we knew that these boys loved watching movies – particularly big blockbusters with social cache. Funnily enough, many of these movies are based on the very thing that we were looking to promote.

With this in mind we created Book Trailers; we would hijack blockbusters’ promotional activity using beautifully crafted trailers to promote books and reading.

Our first trailer had a call to action for children to download a free sample of the relevant book.

Partnering with Bloomsbury and Warner Brothers,’ our first Book Trailer was for the book that inspired the new ‘Fantastic Beasts’ movie. It encouraged kids to read the book before the movie is released. Where the movie went, the book followed, with trailer playing before the film trailer in cinemas.

To maximize our limited budget we focused on cinemas in South Auckland, the region with the highest number of boys in our target age group and ethnic background – more than double the rest of the country .

The book trailer itself used stunning animation that reflected the style and content of the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ book. It inspired children to learn more about the beasts that would star in the movie, to give them more insider beast knowledge than their peers. The trailer also encouraged reading from the outset, by getting kids to read along with it as it played.

To get kids reading straight away, a book sample was available on mobile – with over 2000 downloads, this was 33% higher than target.

In cinema, 98,956 people saw our trailer, 41% over target. 279,819 people engaged with reading nooks in cinema foyers, 39.9% over target. We reached 34% of youth readers before the “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” movie premiere. Book Trailers was developed into a lesson plan for schools and was promoted by the NZ Ministry of Education.