Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenges
During 2017’s year-end blockbuster releases, Jumanji was an underdog. Looming large was StarWars:TheLastJedi. Cinema industry murmured a foregone conclusion that anything other than StarWars would scrape up crumbs. But not Jumanji. Our challenge was to build awareness uniquely, challenging StarWars for ticket sales.

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
We positioned Jumanji as a JUNGLE-ADVENTURE film to watch alongside a SPACE-ADVENTURE film under the conviction that navigating through jungles is as exciting as travelling through galaxies. We focused on Jumanji’s gaming-inspired story – 4 protagonists get sucked into a video-game world. We tuned into this gaming connection by building an event around hotly trending VR technologies. A VR simulation would be as close as we could get to recreating a Jumanji world.

Media Execution
HitzFM anchored the programme. Announcers created talkability revolving around who they would choose to enter a game world with. This escalated to a call-out inviting listeners to participate in a VR challenge in conjunction with Jumanji. Interested listeners were prompted to submit photos of themselves and their teammate doing their best impression of a jungle-ready team. 6 teams were selected based on their creativity in the image-submission stage and faced off against each other at VR-LAB-PUBLIKA on the 23Dec2017. The challenge was set in a VR jungle world, which allowed for direct references to Jumanji. The winning team brought home a PS4 VR set each. The resulting social media buzz around the VR activation greatly elevated interest on Jumanji.

Results and Effectiveness
Jumanji’s performance far surpassed ALL expectations. Not only did Jumanji perform better than StarWars, it became the highest grossing film of 2017 and best of all, the 3rd highest grossing film of all time in Malaysia. Lead actor Dwayne Johnson himself recognized Jumanji’s success here by sending his love and gratitude to Malaysians.