Not Just Stockholm Film Festival
Agency: Geelmuyden Kiese & Rocket Science
Client: Stockholm Film Festival
Award: Best Use of Influencer Marketing, 2025: Gold
“What a fantastically effective approach - taking a ground-up approach and engaging cinephiles has really worked - masterclass in strategic reinvention - campaign’s success in achieving an all-time revenue high while simultaneously renewing its core audience makes this a standout entry”
Brief
Stockholm International Film Festival has previously been a key institution for film and cinema in Sweden. However, over recent years, its prominence had declined, along with the interest from sponsors as well as support and grants from government institutions.
In addition to the above, ticket and membership sales are a key revenue stream for the festival.
Research showed that awareness around the festival, its dates and which films are being shown was low compared to pre-pandemic years. And that its aging core target audience wasn't growing, instead it was shrinking.
With movie theatres having been struggling for years, many even claim that the entire movie industry is dead. Sweden, with a population of 10 million people, is no exception. During the first half of 2024, 350,000 fewer people went to the movies compared to the same period in 2023. Stockholm International Film Festival was facing several challenges. We identified three key challenges;
POSITIONING: The festival was perceived as elitist, and its program as culturally inaccessible to a younger and broader audience.
AWARENESS: Not enough people knew about the festival’s offerings and when it took place.
TARGET AUDIENCE: The festival's core audience was absent, and the festival had previously failed to connect with a new younger audience.
We needed a solution that did two things; drive awareness and change the way the festival was perceived. The brief was to create an unmissable event that generated buzz before, during and after the festival, in a way that increased ticket and membership sales, by re-attracting lapsed members and customers and reaching a completely new audience.
Because of the current situation of cinema and film in Sweden with many cinemas closing their doors and seeing dwindling visitor numbers, something drastic needed to be done to reinvigorate the festival. Something that took Stockholm Film Festival out of its current state of low awareness and elitist image and in front of a wider public and new audiences.
Our starting point was actually the negative trend of cinemas closing, and how a small but dedicated community is taking things into their own hands and building their own home-made cinemas.
Solution
Our idea was built on one fundamental, local insight: Sweden has a unique community of home-built cinema owners, partially a result of cinemas closing in rural parts of Sweden. Ordinary, not particularly rich, people all over the country, who share one thing with the Stockholm International Film Festival; they are obsessed with full cinematic movie experiences. This community became our heroes for the campaign.
We started by searching for Sweden’s most dedicated home theatre owners through forums, niche media outlets, and local newspapers. Once we had found our ambassadors, we started by drumming up interest and excitement through the home-cinema owners' own channels and locally in their towns.
We brought the festival beyond the capital of Stockholm and introduced six unique home-built movie-theatres scattered all over Sweden to the festival programme.
These home-built cinemas became locations for six Nordic red-carpet premiers of international films, all held in places far away from Stockholm; in a basement, a garage, two living rooms, and a former laundry room.
The home-theatre screenings were fully integrated into the festival's programme with tickets being sold just as for every other of the festival's screenings. This helped drive traffic to the festival website and to drive sales and consideration of the festival's “usual” screenings.
Not only did we engage the home-built theatre community, the owners became the main spokespeople for the festival, making it more inclusive and accessible. Because who better to promote the magic of cinema than people who love cinema so much that they have built a movie-theatre in their home.
With the home-theatre owners as our ambassadors, we made Stockholm International Film Festival a national happening for the general public, rather than a local event for the cultural elite in the capital.
The festival took place from Nov 6 to Nov 17, which meant that the campaign was competing for media attention with the US election. To make sure we got through, we strategically crafted and released multiple stories, through content and PR, that were activated on both local and national level, from before the festival started throughout the entire festival, and invited media to the local screenings.
A cinematic trailer launched the idea as well as two portrait videos showcasing the various home-theatres and their owners. The films were distributed on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and screened in cinemas before the festival and ahead of each screening throughout the festival.
Results
Not Just Stockholm Film Festival became more than just a marketing campaign. It proved to the media, the industry and the general public that a film festival can reinvent itself and challenge the age-old idea of how a film festival “should work”. The campaign required full commitment from several stakeholders, including festival and program management, film distributors and even a film's director in one case.
+3,500 tickets sold compared to 2023.
+16.6% in ticket revenue and +13.6% in membership revenue. (All-time high)
Audience renewal: 18% increase in the 18–25 age group and 15% in the 26–35 age group.
+240,000 visitors to the festival’s website compared to 2023.
+381% in unique organic reach on social media compared to 2023.
557 articles and features in 106 different media outlets (TV, radio, lifestyle, and local media).
Ad value $12M (media spend $0).
Not Just Stockholm Film Festival was an earned-first campaign, where the news story became the main point in which people took part in the campaign. Based on culturally relevant insight, and equally relevant execution we put the Stockholm Film Festival back on the cultural map and into the minds of the Swedish people.
The campaign didn't just create one big bang, it created several. With new news angles and content stories before, during and throughout the entire festival. For five consecutive weeks, the campaign was constantly covered in the media, from small local outlets to Sweden's largest news programs.