Cannes Film Market 2015 Expands Global Online Community with Partnerships

Several weeks ago, we joined 35,000 film industry professionals and more than 4,000 journalists from 100+ countries at the Cannes Film Festival, the 12-day global film industry event in the South of France, and co-located b2b event, the Marché du Film (Cannes Film Market).

One of the things that was hard to miss at the Cannes Film Market was the promotion for Cinando, the event’s global online community and networking platform, which according to the event organizer has 60,000 members, 25,000 companies, 44,000 films pages and 10,000,000 views/year.

Building year-long online communities is an objective for many event organizers as there are obvious benefits. However, there also have to be unique value drivers for visitors, if you want them to visit your online community on an ongoing basis after your event.

We highlight one of the ways the Cannes Film Market delivers a differentiated value prop with Cinando… the event organizer has partnered with other major film markets and festivals throughout the year and across the world.

This strategy enables the event organizer to provide Cinando members with “access to the complete list of attendees, films and screening schedules” at all of these other events as well, and add these events’ participants, a targeted group of industry professionals, to the platform, which helps drive the “network effect”.

These partnerships have made this platform relevant across a much wider time window and geographic footprint than if the platform was limited only to Cannes, and enable Cinando to deliver on its tagline “Travel with us all year long!” Analysis of web traffic data supports this tagline too as there is substantial traffic on the platform throughout the year not just in May during Cannes.

Partnering with other industry events, sharing your brand equity and letting others capitalize on your investment of resources may seem counterintuitive.

However, by taking this holistic approach, this organizer has created a true social media tool for the industry, and leveraged these partnerships to drive platform scale.

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Posted on June 10, 2015