Smartfilm is a mobile cinema festival with a 9 year history. It is an image project of A1 company, and its task is to attract attention of a wide audience to the company's activity.

The festival constantly cooperates with the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Belarus and is an important part of the country’s cultural life. It has had international status for several years already, with works from other countries are submitted to the competition program. However, each year the goal of the festival is to grow both in the amount of participants and in audience loyalty and recognition.

Significant promotion festival on the international arena was the goal/

Objectives:

To attract the attention of an international audience to the festival.

To continue to form the image of an innovative European company that develops cinematography in Belarus.

To increase the website traffic

To increase the number of countries-participants

VOKA Smartfilm - International Mobile Film Festival in Belarus. But how to tell the whole world about the festival in an unknown country with a minimum budget? Idea: Recently a Hollywood action hero showed our country to the world. It was John Wick! A1 Team suggested a strategy to use hero's popularity to announce an unknown festival. And agency created a short film that tells a childhood story of famous killer from Belarus. In our film, old-timers of small village saw him growing up and shared vivid memories. In the end, they invited John back home and to the festival.

We chose the genre of fan pseudo-documentary, where on one hand we have the believability of people, places, events, and on the other, we get a feeling of a joke that should be watched till the very end

In the summer 2019, Belarus was introduced to the world by the Hollywood action movie character John Wick (played by Keanu Reeves). For Belarus, this became top news - large publications talked about it, and many memes appeared all over social networks.

Noticing interest in the topic, we studied foreign experience and came to the conclusion that mentioning/referring to a world star traditionally attracts a lot of media attention, and we now officially had a reason to do it

We posted the movie on fan community sites. This is where content has a potential to go viral and have enough credibility among movie fans.

The film audience - 18-35, M / F progressive, active, those who have been working on their own films for a long time or are just getting ready to shoot their first film. They appreciate and understand gadgets and modern technology, want to express themselves

In order for the project to work, it became necessary to solve two problems: 1) to create content that can catch everyone’s attention and 2) to develop a placement/seeding strategy for the content to be noticed. A festival becomes notable through its notable content.

We decided to create a film as it was the closest and most understandable language for both the audience and the festival.

So, we posted the movie on fan community sites. This is where content has a potential to go viral and have enough credibility among movie fans.

The key channel for the campaign was Pikabu, a russian-speaking entertainment community. Each user can post something that the audience discusses and raises to the top of the news.

We managed to attract a community member with a high rating inside for free, who posted the video on his own behalf. Thus, the content was initially well received

With a budget of $2,000 spent on the production of the film, we received approximately $500,000 in free coverage. The film became a full-fledged high-profile advertising campaign that was able to draw attention to the festival

The video was posted by the largest media outlets, portals, forums and bloggers from many countries (Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, USA and many others). Most of the articles mentioned the festival itself, and the opportunity to apply for it.

In total, more than 600,000 users watched the video on various platforms. (February - March 2020)

In total, the video generated around 150 publications all over the world (February - March 2020).

Website traffic increased by 203%.

More than 75 countries-participants