In 2002, John Christiano founded Project C in Venice, CA, after landing his first solo digital marketing gig for Paramount Pictures' THE ITALIAN JOB.
13 years later, our agency has office space in Austin, TX populated by a creative team of 9 full-time employees specializing in innovative design, imaginative story telling, and crisp social interactivity. Since it's inception, Project C has forged a reputation for "using no standard solutions" while engaging web users & magnetizing prospective audience members for over 130 Feature Films, Television Programs, and Video Games.
Last year, 30% of the #1 box office films in the United States were supported by Project C digital and social media campaigns. We had written & produced original ancillary content for a pool of A-List talent and Oscar Winners, and helped thrust 2 network television shows to record debuts with our award-winning creative components & strategy. In the brief history of our small agency, 2013 was our busiest & most successful year to date.
So how would Project C possibly match that productivity and triumph for 2014?
Well, we rolled up our collective sleeves and went back to work, doing what we love to do, the best way we know how… creating good content that's great marketing.
2014…
It presented us with many opportunities. Not only to design some radical digital campaigns to support each unique brand, but also to execute some first-rate uses of social media to help spread them across the web.
Here a few of the highlights;
AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW
To capture the manic anticipation for the premiere of American Horror Story's fourth season, Freak Show, we set out to create an immersive microsite. The site featured full-frame imagery, minimalist navigation and animated transitions that captured the eerie, goose bump-inducing atmosphere that fans have come to expect.
The goal was three-pronged: 1) introduce the new set of characters, 2) elegantly display the surreal promotional art, and 3) host and moderate a social feature that showcased amazing user submitted Instagram videos using #WeAreAllFreaks.
The AHS Freak Show banner campaign yielded some of the most diverse and disturbingly beautiful ads we've created to date. Each banner, skin and takeover was unique, but carried the Freak Show look and feel. Ultimately, we presented a stunning collection of artwork and some truly cringe worthy fan and cast videos that were all sharable on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest with a single click.
THE GIVER
Our digital experience immersed users into the dystopian world of THE GIVER by empowering them to fully interact with the film's titular character, an enigmatic keeper of life memories and complex secrets of a clandestine, futuristic community.
We wrote, produced and edited a digital feature that placed audiences into the virtual seat of The Receiver, creating direct face-to-face encounters with the Giver, as portrayed "in-character" by Academy-Award winner Jeff Bridges himself. Leveraging Google Chrome's speech recognition technology, we created a hands-free, no-click environment that tracked and moderated user responses, triggering video memory transfers - crafted by our in-house creative team, including original music.
Plus, when users logged on with Facebook, our custom application personalized the feature with key moments throughout the experience with images from their own Photo Galleries. These were shared with a user's friends and family, and they were auto-reminded when a new training session from the Giver was available.
We anchored a 16-week media roll out that integrated Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and more to create a truly immersive social campaign.ARCHER (SEASONS 5 & 6)
For Season 5, ARCHER's creators turned the entire plot on its head by revamping the show into the 80's inspired Archer Vice. So, we took great care to speak the same language as Archer's fan-base. Reddit was a key placement due to the site's demographics and Archer's popularity amongst its users.
We created ads more intimate to the Reddit community, by joining the shows salacious sense of humor with the popular NSFW subreddit r/gonewild. The results quickly sparked conversation on Reddit, and within 24-hours articles were popping up on Digg, Buzzfeed, Esquire, AV Club, Time Entertainment, Adweek, and many more.
For Season 6, Project C aimed its sites at Tumblr, and reinvented a favorite yuletide tradition designing and constructing a hilarious, digital advent calendar counting down to the show's 2015 premiere. Using custom clips, stills, GIFs and Infographics this feature offered a daily surprise for users to share and discuss. The exclusive content was perfectly in line with the risqué humor & distinct style that ARCHER's become famous for.
Plus, to cement an even stronger social network foothold, we generated promotional images & custom countdown art for each day that is distributed through the show & network social media channels, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
For this mission we were tasked with launching a brand new title within the Marvel Universe.
Our way to recruit potential audiences was to design and create a GIF Generator that made it fun and easy to insert themselves within the line-up of the unlikely movie heroes. A brief and entertaining tutorial empowered users to create their custom GIF and share it simply across the social networks.
Over 1,200 shares were recorded the first hour alone on Facebook, and twice that on Tumblr. Plus, thousands more spread across the universe the week before the film's record opening.
AND, SO…
The results speak for themselves. The premiere of AHS: FREAKSHOW broke all FX records, scaring up over 10 millions viewers and making it the most-watched single program in the 20 year history of the network. The GIVER over-performed with a world-wide ROI of 250%. ARCHER Season 5 was it's highest rated season premiere episode ever. ARCHER Season 6 still averages over 1 million viewers per episode. And, Guardians of The Galaxy became the highest grossing feature film of the year… at warp speed!
