The social media game of 2014: Hrithik's the winner but SRK, Aamir can't care less

Kim Kardashian may have broken the internet, but as far as we Bollywood watchers are concerned, we can conclusively say, Aamir Khan did it first. After all, it was Khan who debuted his nude PK poster on his Twitter account and set off an online frenzy across India, months before Kardashian graced the cover of Paper magazine and sent the world wide web into a tizzy.

Khan truly did a brilliant job at breaking the internet in 2014. With innovative online marketing strategies which included poster launch marathon and tweeting in Bhojpuri, Khan used the Internet masterfully to create a positive online buzz for PK. The best part? Although there were a great many videos and teasers along with motion posters and songs from the film to be found online, we barely knew anything about the film’s plot and/or characters until its release. This may have been one of the many factors why PK aroused audience’s curiosity and was an instant hit on its release.

However, despite Rs 200 crore earnings at the box office, and yet another blockbuster in his kitty, Khan didn’t win the internet this year. In 2014, Best Online Promotion Award should ideally go to Hrithik Roshan for his film Bang Bang!.

Never before have we seen Bollywood collectively playing cheerleader for a particular film but thanks to Roshan’s Bang Bang! dares, several known faces of the industry did just that. The game of dares that Roshan came up with to promote his film involved a simple task that Roshan asked each of his colleagues to perform. Several actors like Ranveer Singh, Farhan Akhtar and Priyanka Chopra sportingly accepted the challenge and performed the task that Roshan dared them to do. Some of the videos of Roshan’s star friends doing those dares even became viral.In the end, Roshan achieved what even Tom Cruise couldn’t do: he made Bang Bang!-- a remake of Cruise’s flop film, Knight and Day-- a massive hit.

Much like other actors, Shah Rukh Khan too accepted Roshan’s Bang Bang! challenge. Well, sort of. Roshan dared Khan to do his favourite abs routine, but instead of that, Khan tweeted out a video of himself flaunting his 10 pack abs during Happy New Year shoot. While Khan did mention Bang Bang! in the end of the video, he totally turned the table on Roshan and promoted his film (which was then due for a Diwali film) instead of Bang Bang!

Shah Rukh Khan is often called the King of Marketing in the industry and one look at the pre-release drills that the actor undertakes for each of his films will tell you that he takes promotion as seriously (in fact, in some cases more seriously) as acting. Happy New Year, produced by Khan’s production house Red Chillies Entertainment, is a good case in point.

From visiting Twitter headquater at San Francisco, to changing his twitter handle to the name of his HNY character and launching the trailer on WhatsApp, Khan did his best to milk the Internet.

“We started promoting our film (HNY) 10 months in advance, wherein digital played a major role is keeping the communication going,” said Manish Kumar, Head of Marketing and Digital, Red Chilles Entertainment. Between 8-10% of the total marketing budget alloted for HNY was spent on digital promotions.

Similarly, Viacom18 Motion Pictures’ Marketing Head, Rudrarup Dutta, said the amount Viacom spends on digital marketing has increased from 2-3% to 7-10% in past few years. Viacom18 produced two successful films in 2014 – Mary Kom and the surprise hit, Queen. For the latter in particular, the Internet played a part to spread the positive word-of-mouth reactions to the film.

“Digital is an engagement medium,” said Dutta. “It is the medium that generates interests of the audiences in the film and allows them to engage in discussions regarding it. In that sense, this medium brings organic attention to films.” he added.

However, Dutta, as well as several other marketing heads point out that despite social media’s growing reach, the traditional methods of promotion, such as tours, press conferences as well as print and television media remain the main promotional vehicle to sell any film. For HNY, Shah Rukh still took a mini world tour with his team to promote the film in key markets abroad. Red Chilles also heavily targeted traditional media, with front page jackets of HT Cafe and Bombay Times to promote the film. Salman Khan, whose Kick was a big hit in 2014, stuck to television appearances to talk about Kick. Despite PK making headlines every other day, Aamir Khan took out 43 days to promote the film.

Priyanka Chopra’s Mary Kom also generated a lot of online buzz in 2014, even though all of it wasn’t entirely positive though. The film was repeatedly bashed on social media sites for casting Chopra (who doesn’t look like Mary Kom) in the titular role.

However, this was nothing in comparison to the reaction that another Chopra starrer, Gunday got from the internet. A group of Bangladeshi bloggers took serious offence at the film saying that the birth of Bangladesh was a side effect of the Indo-Pak war. A hate campaign to bury the film, with hashtags such as #GundayHumiliatedHistoryOfBangladesh being used and Facebook pages being formed. As a direct result of this online hate campaign, Gunday has the tag of statistically being the worst film ever made, with an IMdB rating of 1.4.

Among the internet’s great charms, as far as film promotion is concerned, is that it still costs a lot less than traditional forms of publicity, whether it’s a full-page ad or live events. If it works and a film’s promotional online material – like videos and images – is able to go viral, then the numbers that are reached are enough to make everyone feel giddy. But the public is a fickle beast, as Gunday’s IMDb page shows and no matter how well you may plan a campaign, no one can tell what will break the Internet. Other than an almost-naked Aamir Khan or Kim Kardashian, of course.