It’s rare that someone or something turns 100, especially an iconic studio like Columbia Pictures—the home of iconic titles like Spider-Man, Breaking Bad, Ghostbusters, Jumanji, Seinfeld, and more. That’s one hundred years of drama, suspense, laughter, and love. One hundred years of stories, memories, and quotes. But most importantly, it’s one hundred years of fandom.
To celebrate this monumental year, we aimed to shine a light on the incredible depth and breadth of our library and, in turn, the many fandoms our titles have attracted and helped to create—all through innovative digital and social creative and activations that attracted meaningful engagement.
To honor the studio’s incredibly rich legacy of classic film and television, our goals were clear: commemorate our goldmine of library titles, engage and shine a light on the fans who made it all possible, and ultimately foster community around this monumental year.
To achieve this goal, our year-long campaign was designed to allow existing fans to steer the trajectory of how we commemorate their favorite titles and introduce a plethora of iconic titles to new fans, namely Gen Z audiences, who may not have ever seen them.
Our planning began in mid-2023, many months before Columbia Pictures 100 began. The studio put together a task force with representatives from several different teams to help bring our celebration to life. Our digital and social marketing team was tasked with sustaining a year-long campaign across all major social platforms. We wanted to make our campaign unique by focusing on fans as a key pillar of our strategy.
The bedrock of our digital strategy was to conceive and execute big “earthquake” digital activations to kick off the celebration, such as:
We supplemented these activations with social and creator content streams which we could tailor to different titles or occurrences in the zeitgeist:
Our team had to create the bandwidth to support our studio’s entire catalog, consistently brainstorm out-of-the-box ideas, collaborate with many stakeholders, and ensure our content would resonate globally. Every element of Columbia Pictures 100 was crafted and executed with the idea that our fans could slot themselves into their favorite cinematic worlds and discover new ways to connect with beloved titles.
Our year-long efforts on social media, the culmination of 120 separate posts and dozens of creator partnerships, resulted in over 30M impressions, 13.5M views, and 860K engagements (and growing!). Our film and TV personality quiz saw over 236K page visits and 54K downloads, winning two Site of the Day awards in the process. Our “My Life as a Movie” TikTok filter, which allowed users to see which of our titles best described their life, went viral with over 130K uses, becoming Sony Pictures’ most successful AR filter on the platform to date and far surpassing the platform’s average filter use rate. Our One Sony social support helped us climb to over 1B impressions.
Outside of great success across social platforms, we saw great gains in title-specific sales. We decided to use the results of our fan poll to determine which titles would go on sale for transactional viewing, driving an increase in incremental revenue for our distribution unit. By remaining adaptable, we were able to meet fans’ demands consistently.
These milestones served as validation for our team’s dedicated conception and execution, but perhaps our greatest achievement coming out of Columbia Pictures 100 was our knowledge that new life had been breathed into our catalog.
