SF Film and Facebook Fictional Characters

Nikki Sørensen likes to say that despite having reached the ripe old age of 41, she still gets to play on a very large digital playground every day. "I can experiment, try things and if they don't pan out as I expect, then I can change direction or, in some cases, go in for the kill with the result being that I learn something new about user behavior," says Sørensen, the digital media manager at SF Film A/S in Denmark.

So when it came to marketing the teen film Max Pinlig (which translates to Max Embarrassing in English), Sørensen decided to try something new. "Our bureau was going to do some premium Facebook ads with a fairly low budget and I wanted to do something a little different and experimental, just to see how much I could get out of Facebook on a creative level," she says. And that's where the fun began.

Since Facebook recently allowed administrators of fan pages to use the fan page essentially as a regular Facebook page, Sørensen decided to combine the possibilities that created with a new type of fan page expressly for fictional characters: She created Facebook pages for the six main characters in the film linked to on the main Facebook fan page for the film, assigning her assistant Rikke Oberlin Flarup the task of keeping the pages going. "Rikke read the script a few times to make sure she understood the people she would be bringing to life," says Sørensen.

While Sørensen  and Flarup marketed the film from its own main fan page in the usual manner, on the fictional character fan pages Flarup embodied the characters, carrying on conversations between them and dropping small hints on the main fan page that it was possible to be "friends" with the various characters until the pages took on a life of their own, with Flarup spending a couple of minutes at different times during the day to answer questions, make new posts or update things. "The investment isn't so big and I hope she thinks it's fun!" Sørensen says. "It's about how to use Facebook creatively and experimentally without breaking the multitude of Facebook rules or the Danish Marketing Law with few resources."

The results were quite interesting from a segment point of view, says Sørensen. With two target groups - young teens (primarily girls) and their mothers, since the film is a family film - the older age group was fairly strong at first, but the teens quickly took over the pages, carrying on their own conversations with the characters, commenting and interacting at length with their favorites.

"There was still a bit of a gap when it comes to the reaction," says Sørensen. "There were those who understood (or at least accepted) what was going on and began to interact with the characters and those who were confused and couldn't really make sense of what was going on. With the latter group we tried to quietly explain without spoiling the illusion."

All in all, Sørensen deems the project a success: The young girls (and a good percentage of boys) have been posting on the walls of both the fan page and the character profiles, asking questions and making comments, she says. "The mothers have also been active, though not at the same level, asking other users whether they should take their kids in to see the film for example," she says. "There are nearly 6,000 fans now, and we're very happy about that and we'll carry on actively answering fans and creating content until the next milestone in the film's life: DVD release."