Helping a film festival activate online during COVID

With COVID preventing film festivals around the country from going ahead, the 2020 edition of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) took place online.

Bolster was engaged to help sell tickets to MIFF 68 ½ – the festival’s digital version – by educating new audiences about the event and driving awareness to regional Victoria and wider Australia.

Our challenge was to promote the entire program (118 films) in a cost effective way.

Bolster worked with MIFFs developers to pull film information from the festival’s website to create a product catalogue in Facebook. This functionality allowed us to promote the program in its entirety without people having to leave the Facebook app, while dynamic product ads helped drive cheaper conversions at a cost-per-click of $0.24.

The ability to create custom collections helped promote the more niche offerings within the program by serving relevant films to relevant audiences.

In the end, MIFF 68½ broke the record for the festival’s largest audience ever, also setting a sales record for digital festivals on the Shift72 film festival streaming platform.