The trailer for Sharknado 2: The Second One, unveiled to the delight of the SXSW crowd. The movie sparks panel discussion on why the movie worked. Ian Ziering prepares to shoot a flying shark out of the sky in Sharknado, a ridiculous thriller that generated a lot of buzz last summer. Part two will air in July.
Ian Ziering prepares to shoot a flying shark out of the sky in Sharknado, a ridiculous thriller that generated a lot of buzz last summer. Part two will air in July.No, it’ll never topple Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia from the list of the finest movies of all time, but the SyFy Channel’s knowingly foolish 2013 B-movie about bloodthirsty sharks being dumped upon the unsuspecting streets of Los Angeles by a giant waterspout benefited from one of the most successful campaigns of cross-platform marketing synergy in recent memory. Twitter users ate up Sharknado as enthusiastically as the sharks in the film gobbled up unlucky Californians, resulting in an unprecedented real-time ratings boost for the TV film as it aired and a subsequently huge jump in viewership for future rebroadcasts.
You can’t buy that kind of publicity, as the saying goes. And, for the record, SyFy didn’t. Which leads us to “Sharknado & Twitter: The Perfect Social Storm,” a thoroughly well-attended and enthusiastically received panel discussion at the South by Southwest Interactive conference that attempted on Sunday afternoon to dissect just what went right on July 11, 2013 – referred to in the several pages of analytical data projected onscreen during the session as “Sharknado Day.” Or “#Sharknado Day,” if you’d prefer to use Twitter vernacular.
The Sharknado phenomenon was nowhere as large as the infamous Ellen Degeneres Oscar “selfie” that briefly knocked Twitter out with more than two million rapid re-Tweets last weekend, but the stats are still staggering.
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Some 140,000 people got in on the action during the movie’s initial SyFy run, at times weighing in with snide comments and good-natured jokes at a rate of 5,000 Tweets a minute while it aired. An animated map of Twitter activity around North America on July 11 presented during the seminar showed pockets of localized chatter gradually building through the broadcast into a nationwide frenzy that looked like a NORAD radar readout tracking a nuclear holocaust of the States by the time it was done. Sharknado eventually went on to inspire 313,245 first-time Twitter mentions by 266,164 individual users Tweeting.
“A lot of people started changing the channel saying ‘I’ve got to go see this,” observed Fred Graver, who heads up Twitter’s TV division. “People were Tweeting about it who weren’t even watching, just because of the fun of it and the party atmosphere.”
SyFy seeded the Twitter mania with a few well-placed TV spots during big episodes of series like The Walking Dead, some coy Tweets of its own and a knowing sense of self-awareness about Sharknado’s place in the cinematic universe, said network representative Dana Ortiz. But whereas in some cases networks and film studios actually buy celebrity endorsements on platforms like Twitter, “there was zero of that in this particular case.” It just so happened that the right “influencers” – comedian Patton Oswalt, for instance, former Star Trek: The Next Generation star Wil Wheaton and even Mia Farrow – got on board of their own volition and got the ball rolling.
It didn’t hurt, either, that SyFy had a sense of humour about Sharknado itself. As Ortiz put it to a room that no doubt contained a fair bit of spillover from the South by Southwest film festival – there were quite a few people in attendance wondering aloud how they might duplicate the feat with their own future endeavours – “you can’t be too precious” about your programming when it gets this kind of not-quite-desirable attention. You just get “in on the joke,” “be nimble” and go with it. Ortiz stressed the folly of trying to reproduce this sort of grassroots response by artificial means, too, noting that one must let viewers indulge in “an authentic conversation.”
Anyway, it all worked very well for Sharknado. An Aug. 22 rerun of the film saw a whopping 139 per cent increase in ratings, pointing the way to a whole new and more “patient” release strategy for TV productions where you wait for the numbers to gradually come your way rather than throwing all your energy into one big, expensive rollout.
It also pointed the way to Sharknado 2: The Second One, whose hilarious trailer was unveiled “hot off the press” to the delight of the SXSW crowd. It will air in July.
Laughed Ortiz: “We knew there was going to be a Sharknado 2 about three seconds after Sharknado 1 exploded.”
