Big Patek Philippe Exhibition in NYC Uses Social Video

Iconic brand Patek Philippe organized its largest ever exhibition in NYC, July 13 – 23, 2017, featuring several hundred million dollars of timepieces, some dating back to the 1500s.

“The Grand Exhibition is of a scale we’ve never seen before. We’ve done one exhibition in Dubai, one in Munich and the last one in London, but we’ve never had this many historical pieces out of the [Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva] at one time,” said Larry Pettinelli, the president of Patek Philippe U.S., in a July 11, 2017 article in The New York Times.

One of the things that caught our attention about the marketing of The Art of Watches Grand Exhibition New York, which attracted thousands of visitors, was the robust social video campaign.

We highlight this event promotion because no other medium is better at capturing the essence of live events than video.  In addition, major social nets are generating billions of daily views, and we are seeing strong engagement metrics from social video deployments for our clients’ exhibitions and events.

Here are five takeaways from Grand Exhibition social video campaign…

– We counted some 25 videos on Facebook alone, which generated more than half a million views, in addition to social actions (likes, comments and shares).  The most popular video, which was pinned to the top of the page, generated over 150,000 views by the end of the show.

– Video durations ranged from 23 to 56 seconds, and the most popular video, mentioned above, ran for :44.

– All of the messaging on the many videos we watched was done with text overlays.  None of it was done with voiceovers.  This means that if you watched the videos in “sound off” mode or had the volume turned down on your device, you would still get the entire message.

– Each video focused on a different aspect of the exhibition. For example, one video invited viewers to visit the exhibition to see the delicate art of gem-setting, while another one focused on royal timepieces… “Discover Queen Victoria’s timepiece from the 1851 World’s Fair in London, where Patek Philippe’s relationship with royalty began.”

– The flight window for the video campaign was about two and a half months.  The first video we noticed appeared on May 8.  One key point to note is videos kept being posted all the way through the event i.e. deployment did not stop once the event opened.  In fact, 50% of the videos were posted during the actual event.

Online video consumption has skyrocketed over the past several years, and viewing is projected to rise another 20% in 2017, with global consumers spending an average of 47.4 minutes a day viewing videos online, according to Zenith’s Online Video Forecasts 2017, published last month.  Keep video in mind as you develop your creative asset portfolio.

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Posted on August 10, 2017