- Written by Marcello
- 20 min read
Borat 2 Marketing Campaign Case Study
How a fast casual restaurant, leant onto the launch of Borat’s sequel movie, to boost organic-, paid brand awareness and consideration.
Many factors make or break the results of a Paid Advertising campaign.
When it comes to developing the advertising strategy, the process can entail many steps:
Extensive audience research, data analysis, system tracking configuration, platform and campaign type selection… the list goes on forever.
As we continue over the years to plan, setup, run, test, retest and finally analyze advertising campaigns; One building block, one factor, repeatedly shows up to wear the crown.
It decides upon the faith and outcome of ads performance.
This king is called content.
Hereafter we’ll see why content is king in digital marketing (and yes, it applies also to online ads) and how it’s possible, for small shops with restricted resources, to run a performant advertising commercial, provided that content is king.
Preface: Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Release and Worldwide Marketing Campaign
On October 23th 2020, the “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” aka Borat – Part 2 was released on Amazon Prime Video. A movie that would later go on to become iconic through its criticism to Trump administration and Giuliani’s compromising scene.
Parallel to that and as part of a global promotion, various Borat impersonations where released to wander around the world in locations like London, Sydney and Rome to spread the word through typical catchphrases like “jagshemash” or “very nice!”.
In Rome, Melograno, a fast casual restaurant, had the pleasure to delight the Kazakh figures with some of it’s homemade ice cream at its Trevi Fountain location and being part of Borat’s 2 marketing campaign
Obviously, the stunt was coordinated days before and recorded by OMDemocracy to be used on social media and advertisement.
Today we’ll have a look at how we produced king content and how it helped us achieving great results through Facebook and Instagram ads.
Producing the Social Media Content
Taking into consideration both audiences
Once the day of the stunt was confirmed, OMDemocracy started with the development of content strategy.
One of the first things taken into account were Melograno’s and Borat’s audiences.
How could their interests, ideas and feelings overlap with one another ?
Where could common ground be found to convey a joint message?
Melograno’s Audience
Trevi Fountain’s square is filled throughout the day by thousands of tourists from all-over the world (and specifically from the US), who make a pit stop during their vacation to take a closer look at this piece of art.
Specially active sightseers, who are on the road with day-long walking tours through the Italian capital, stop by at this must-see location.
Melograno therefore represents for many tourists a casual place, to quickly rest and restore energy with homemade pizza, ice cream and coffee.
Borat’s Audience
On the other hand, if we weren’t to further investigate the underlaying meaning of Borat’s satire, following characteristics could pop into our minds when thinking about this fictional character:
- never-resting, fast-paced, always on the run, no time management
- funny
- quirky
- inclined to celebration
- easy- and out-going
- welcoming and open minded (on some topics)
- open to cultural interchange, exporting the Kazakh culture around the world and learning about cultures outside of Kazakhstan
- sense and expression of gratitude accompanied by excitement
- sense of belonging to a group or larger family
Notice anything?
Yep: Some of these characteristics like “welcoming and open minded” are exactly what tourists should find in a foreign country, when stopping by a non-franchised, family-like-run business like Melograno.
Idea —> Concept —> Communication
Now that the foundation of driving values and ideas had been set, it was time to define how these feelings should be conveyed through content.
Let’s take then the final video and have a closer look at the storyboard and single scenes to point out the underlaying messages and feeling in each stage:
Thumbnail Image
The multiple Borats and the restaurant manager are grouped in a comradely, team-like, semi-circle next to each other while laughing, celebrating and enjoying an ice cream.
Primary feeling
- Sense of belonging to a group or larger family
Scene 1 (0:02-0:05)
Out of the blue, 8 Borats enter, one after another, the restaurant like nothing happened. Each Borat is minding his own business. Some start to display weird behaviours like greeting with a double thumbs up.
Primary feeling
- Quirky
Scene 2 (0:05-0:10)
One of the Borats casually scratches his groin and is joined by another Borat to express his liking through a double thumbs up pose.
Primary feeling
- Funny
- Easy- and out-going
Scene 3 (0:10-0:15)
One Borat is photographed by the international press while trying one of the cultural specialities of Italy:
the gelato ice cream.
Primary feeling
- Sense and expression of gratitude accompanied by excitement
Scene 4 (0:15-0:20)
The Borats exchange a dialogue with the gesticulating manager, which in their opinion is speaking a dialect of Kazakh language
Primary feeling
- Open to cultural interchange, exporting the Kazakh culture around the world and learning about culture outside of Kazakhstan
Scene 5 & 6 (0:20-0:27)
The Borats leave the restaurant.
One of them is pretending to make a people count while catching up on his gelato.
On the street, one Borat is seen beating it and looking over his shoulder while a police officer out of the frame wants to stop him for his inappropriate clothing.
Primary feeling
- Never-resting, fast-paced, always on the run, no time management
Shooting format and pace
As you can see, the video was shoot in a vertical / full portrait format, namely 9:16, especially designed to be consumed on smartphone in the normal browsing vertical position of most phone users.
Also, the video’s fast pace, with single scenes lasting at most 5 seconds, fulfils the rules of most successful video content to show action to the user from second 1.
Publishing and Advertising Content
Harnessing social proof — Showing content first to warm-, then to cold audiences
Once the video was edited, it was published organically on the Facebook and Instagram platforms, before being used as a basis for advertisement.
The restaurant’s modest but loyal follower base, helped bring in the first comments and reactions to lay the foundations for social proof, before being shown to a cold audience.
Side note
The restaurant doesn’t publish very often but when it does, reaches high engagement among its followers.
Campaign and Audience Targeting — Easy: just target users with interest “Borat”
This one was pretty easy, since Facebook’s easy targeting options did help us with it.
Let’s look at the givens and the decisions derived by it:
- The campaign’s purpose was to be a pure brand awareness/engagement campaign, aimed to push on-platform soft-metrics like post engagements and reach.
—> Although we are not a big fan of engagement campaigns, using a pretty known, hard to criticise, comic character like Borat as the center of content, gave use the feeling that not many keyboard warriors would be jumping on board the post’s comment section.
So we went on to use a Post Engagement Campaign to boost reach and consideration.
- As mentioned earlier, Rome is a city where most people are destined to stop by. This is specially true for people living within Italy as it is with US citizens, given the strong diplomatic and cultural bondage between the two countries. Adding to that, is the fact that Borat’s mocking takes place most of the time on American territory and the movie has been sponsored widely within Italy as well.
—> We therefore went on to create two audiences:
- Targeting users living in United States
- Targeting users living in Italy
- Targeting Borat interested users: This is where Facebook really is best at: it gave us the opportunity to simply choose an audience which is interested in Borat. Just couldn’t get simpler than this!
Campaign KPIs and Results
The Simple Formula: Great Content = Great Ads Performance
As specified in the title, when content is king, following cause and effect can be observed in your ads:
Great Content = More User Engagement = Better CTR & CPC = Positive Feedback to Facebook Algorithm = Content Shown More & at Cheaper Price to Users = Increased Reach at Lower Cost = Great Ads Performance
Given the campaign goals of relative on-platform reach and consideration, main successes were achieved through following KPIs:
Post Engagement
The video content was very appreciated by the audiences resulting in high post engagement.
This example below shows the division of post engagements reached on an average day.
As a result, the average Cost per Post Engagement was reduced to €0.004.
CTR & CPC
Other positive indicators of Engagement were observed through the very low CPC of €0.03 and high CTR of 6,98% .
Cost of Reach
The cost per 1,000 People Reached had an average of €3.73 meaning that a daily budget of €50.00 was able to reach 13,396 different users.
Performance differences between American and Italian audience
Using the Campaign Budget Optimization feature, the budget was adjusted automatically across the two ad sets by Facebook, fuelling the better performing audience with more budget.
Using the example of a daily budget of €50.00, around €16 were spend on the American- and ca. €34 on the Italian audience.
So basically, with Borat’s video content, the Italian audience performed better than the American audience.
Let’s look at which metrics influenced Facebook’s budget allocation decision.
Italian Audience had higher Post Engagement
Since we were running a Post Engagement campaign, the main priority was given to the audience reaching the higher Post Engagements.
With an average Cost per Post Engagement of €0.003, the Italian audience performed better than the American audience averaging €0.01.
Thus, higher budget allocation was given to the Italian audience.
American Audience had higher Video Average Play Time
Italian Audience was more likely to keep on watching
On the other hand, the American audience had a higher Video Average Play Time.
The American video average play time was of 00:14 compared to the Italian 00:09.
That’s a 50% play time difference between the two audiences!
Therefore, if the focus would have been on achieving more video views time, the campaign objective “Video Views” would instead have been chosen, resulting most likely with the American audience being allocated more budget by Facebook.
Curiously enough, the Italian audience was slightly more inclined to keep on watching the video from start to finish, with a ratio of Video Plays at 25% to Video Plays at 100% being 3.3 compared to the American 2,8.
Conclusion
As we have seen, treating content as king definitely pays off.
Even if you are not running a content marketing strategy and plan to run online ads only once in a while, make sure to offer the best possible content to your audience!
What are your thoughts the about content within digital marketing and online ads?
Do you have any examples that have proven to be great successes or haven’t performed well?
Thanks again for reading and let us know in the comment section below!
