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Sin City 2 sees 670K views in Coub trailer contest

Troublemaker Studios collaborated with video creator platform Coub to raise awareness for Sin City: A Dame To Kill For through a trailer contest that garnered 200 submissions and 670,000 views.

Coub, a mobile application and Web site, allows users to create their own 10-second video from other clips. The most creative submission in the contest won free movie tickets.

?Coub is the best social media platform for video,? said Nastya Popova, marketing director at Coub, New York. ?Brands with clips to promote, such as, to use examples of clients we've worked with, Red Bull and Sin City 2, use Coub to ensure virality. 

?These brands give their videos to our users and let them create tons of creative Coubs out of it, fostering participation and increasing buzz,? she said. ?Marketing options on Coub are now mostly on Web site, but, that said, the resulting Coubs are shown and often created on the mobile version. 

?The app is ad-free as for now. We don?t show banners or branding there.? 

Making moves
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa did a similar campaign with Coub earlier this year.

Images for the film appeared on the app and on Coub.com. More than 100 Coubs were created during the campaign, and the campaign garnered more than 1.3 million views. There were 3,900 likes on the Web site and 1,300 Recoubs or shares.

For the Sin City 2 campaign on Coub, 200 Coubs were made and submitted, and there were 670,000 views on the channel.

Coubs that are created appear on both the Coub app and Coub.com. However, any site branding that appears on the site does not appear on the app.

Other brands to use Coub are Guardians of the Galaxy, Meller and Mini Cooper.

In just two months, Coub has doubled its monthly views from one to two million unique monthly viewers in the U.S. Coub is approaching its three billionth view. 

Movies on mobile
Creating an interactive campaign involving a film trailer with a strong mobile aspect has shown success in the recent past.

In July, broadcasting company Fox readied fans for the premiere of the upcoming show Gotham with an interactive contest involving the movie trailer and mobile application SendUs.

Marketers within the entertainment industry hope to keep the consumer?s ongoing attention through adding an interactive experience on mobile for smartphone users. Through these efforts, networks can use the power of user-generated content as brainpower for their own future initiatives (see story).

Similarly, Showtime recently partnered with Immersion Corporation to use its haptic technology in mobile ads, with the goal of increasing viewer engagement and retention.

Immersion?s haptic technology, which features tactile effects synced with videos, was featured in the television network?s trailer for its hit drama Homeland. Immersion claims that haptic technology is the best way to communicate with mobile device users through touch (see story).

These efforts enable more views, particularly on mobile, for the movie or TV show trailer, which entices consumers to check further into those sources of entertainment for future reference.

?It?s all about number of views the Coubs get, and, as all the Coubs are viewed within our app versus a third party video player, they all add up to the final numbers the project gets,? Ms. Popova said. ?Users watch these Coubs not because we force them to, but because the content itself is great.?

Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York