Five minutes with Denny Tu
In launching Imax’s global brand campaign, ‘Film to the fullest,’ Imax CMO Denny Tu talks through the development of the campaign, Imax’s brand positioning and how to reach a global audience through immersive experiences and one-of-a-kind content
What does the Imax brand stand for?
I think the Imax brand stands for limitless possibilities; the idea that we’re a storytelling company, not just a technology company. This is a company built on 50 years of heritage. We focus not just on creating best-in-class kit, but enabling our filmmakers to tell their stories in incredible ways. If you think back to Imax’s origins, we were able to take you to places you couldn’t go physically – the bottom of the ocean or the moon – through our incredible documentaries. I think when we made the change to a Hollywood world, we were able to bring viewers into these stories in a way that no one else can, in an incredibly immersive, premium, differentiated experience.
What was the positioning of the ‘Film to the fullest’ campaign?
The brand is the experience. For a brand marketeer, the hardest thing is to mimic a world class experience in social marketing or out of home. We’ve had resounding support from our studio partners and our exhibitor partners in the campaign this year in terms of the number of assets they want and in terms of how it’s shifting the market and how it’s doing a great thing for the business as a whole. One of those tenets is brutally simple messaging and speaking to customer benefit rather than technology.
How would you describe Imax’s storytelling approach?
Simple, not simplistic. Confident. Big-hearted. We are using the right channels for the right message. We’ve got some moving image video pieces that will continue to tell this story. One of the complaints that you hear from the general populace is sometimes when campaigns come out it’s one and done. One of the things we built into our strategy was to be very clear about what Imax was and what Imax is and what makes us different. As we go on, we will have an always-on Imax brand function that is able to communicate that throughout the year. That means telling stories in a simpler way, being visual when we can be visual, and also working with our incredible filmmakers and our partners.
How did you approach transcreation when bringing ‘Film to the fullest’ to life?
On a market-by-market basis, we’ve worked with our partners to do transcreation. The worst thing you can do is do a Google Translate. The best thing you can do is talk to your individual partners. China’s an incredible market for us and we work very closely with our fantastic China team in Shanghai, for example.
At the heart of ‘fullest,’ we believe that being the best version of yourself allows you to take things to the fullest. The kit that we have to tell these incredible stories, what I believe is the grandest canvas in the world, that’s part of fullest.
How was the imagery developed and selected?
The concept is essentially, worlds. You have these incredible worlds that are brought to life in this incredible way. In the brand assets, you can see the world that we’re creating. You can see this atmosphere of world and space, you can see this incredible dramatic story on the water, and then you can see this very dynamic dogfight in the sky. You should expect to potentially see other worlds developing and those worlds gave us a lot of room.
We built very high end, ultra HD cinemagraphs that also change the way movie marketing works. If you walked through a multiplex lately you’ll see it hasn’t really changed much for a while. And so many of our partners wanted dynamic, moving images.
There’s thousands of versions that we’ve made for our partners. Each individual multiplex is unique. Some have very beautiful landscape jumbo-trons in the middle of their atriums and we wanted to be able to capture that incredible dogfight, but also push a very clear reason to believe with heart-pounding audio or clear pictures on the largest screens, to help customers and prospects what makes Imax Imax.
How does the 2019 campaign fit in with previous activity?
We were very clear about our strategy. We did a significant piece of research in the beginning of the campaign and put together a very tight brief. It was a very robust brand identity system that would be omnipresent in nearly 80 countries so that the brand communication platform would be clear. That iconic blue frame, we’ll continue to develop and invest in.
Separate from that it was moving image and how we do that. We’ve never done anything to this scale and those worlds give us a lot of flexibility. We think it’s working really well and Imax global box office is up 14% through the first nine months of this 2018 and our social media engagement levels have significant double digit growth, so it tells us that what we’re doing is working.
