Horror movies are about fear. Their success is rarely measured by the storytelling or the casts’ performance. It’s all about the amount and depth of the fear and adrenaline you feel. And, of course, it’s capacity to produce lingering nightmares.

Horror movie trailers are about the anticipation of fear, story-nonsense- telling and scenes – assets.

What we did was change the perspective from assets to emotion, picking the right moment and place to scare the hell out of horror movie fans.

We created an emotion context placement and by doing so we changed the game and rose the anticipation of the movie.

We asked Paramount to send us GIFs of the scariest scenes of the movie to adapt them to short video formats. As the first horror movie released in 3D, we decided to work with full screens, bleeding formats that took over the user screen, maximizing the BOO!

We used YouTube, two video networks, 1 mobile video network and a DSP. With only that, we manage to distribute to a lot of portals, websites and mobile sites generating an average of 33 million impressions per week.

We supported the emotional context placement approach with 25 million social media impressions per week, where people had the space to comment, like and share.

Instantly, we won the Internet back. WOM was spread like a bolt and people shared countless times the GIF to scare their friends. People were eager to run to the cinemas on the first weekend, and they did.

We beat the objective by 18%!

The results were astonishing, first weekend box office sales amounted to $38MM in Mexico. PA6 became the #1 opening among all previous 5 movies of the franchise. 44% of total box office was reached during the first weekend (Average is 27% for this franchise). The spontaneous GIF sharing views were twice as big as the total paid media views.

Also, PA6 was the 3rd best horror film first weekend box office in Mexico, ever!

A simple but highly effective change allowed a successful campaign and invaluable learnings: Emotional context placement is a must for movies that might enhance feelings.

------------- Media results -------------

AVG CTR - 2.72%

Video Start Rate - 28.03%

Video Complete Rate - 41.01%

Almost 2 million interactions on social media.