The Toronto Jewish Film Festival needed to expand ticket sales beyond their predominately Jewish audience. The difficulty was that non-Jewish people thought the Festival only featured boring religious movies. Which was untrue.

Jews have a great reputation in cinema, which thankfully makes up for the other things we’re not so good at. Like using power tools, or building stuff.

That led us to our very self-deprecating campaign idea “Film. It’s what Jews do best.” A humorous insight, that made the festival more approachable to our non-Jewish target and reminded them that they were going to be treated to some entertaining movies.

A fully integrated mass campaign was used to communicate the campaign idea (Film. It’s what Jews do best.). We launched with TV, transit ads and radio leading up to the Festival.

In the second phase, we proved that Jewish people knew a-thing-or-two about film with the launch of J-DAR. An online experience where users could search their favourite movie to see how Jewish it was. J-DAR would then recommend TJFF movies to see based on the Hollywood movie they searched.

In addition to being advertised online, J-DAR was also promoted in mainstream theaters where captive movie-loving audiences were prompted to try JDAR on their mobile devices before pre-roll. The phase was amplified through social outreach to movie & culture bloggers, as well as PR.

J-DAR proved to be highly engaging. Visitors to J-DAR spent on average, over 5 minutes engaging with the site. It created awareness for the festival beyond their typical Jewish audience helping increase ticket sales by 19% from the year before, and most impressively, online ticket sales rose by over 43%.

We had to be extremely resourceful with this campaign as it was executed pro-bono with only minimal budget to cover the cost of our developer. It was a challenge, but an absolute labour of love.