The TIFF Revolution: For the Love of Film
I joined the Toronto International Film Festival to help them with a major cross-channel transformation. The TIFF Digital Studio started as a dream and then a pitch to the organization to lean into original content and campaigns; by the time I left the organization, the team I built and led had created and shared award-winning work across all spaces that I am still extremely proud of, and in the process built a massive global community of film lovers for one of the world’s premiere film organizations and brands.
The essential space for film lovers.
“Digital used to sell on real estate. Now, we are selling on our point of view of the world.” – Digiday
We built out a new multidisciplinary team that was responsible for creating original content, designing and building digital platforms, crafting the visual identity and aesthetic for TIFF and creating 360 multi-channel campaigns.
We had unwavering focus on a single strategy – to transform the way people engage with film – expressed across thousands of individual executions: We made things that people who love film would love. And the results are undeniable.
What my team delivered:
Digital strategy
Design framework and style guide
TIFF branding, publications, collateral and full funnel marketing
Social strategy + execution
Editorial strategy + publishing
Festival photo studio, red carpet series + podcast series
Curated physical experiences
Video/Content strategy + execution
Festival Campaigns
What we accomplished:
Became a film media destination known for year-round programming in addition to a yearly festival.
Grew our audience by 116%, a pace that exceeded our competitors (Sundance, Tribeca, Cannes).
New partnerships and collaborators.
Innovated in story, form and technology.
Increased yearly web traffic and conversion to ticket purchases.
Won awards and grew global brand affinity + recognition.
Produced a series of successful initiatives that generated new revenue opportunities
Increased organic media coverage - Buzz!
Our in-house video team created original video essays, portraits and interviews, as well as capturing all on-stage events at TIFF year-round. We saw over 330% growth of video views across platforms. One of our TIFF Originals has over 8M views.
We grew our audience exponentially (engagement rates rose 1,800% in two years, and our cross-channel following leapt by more than 200%).
Studio 9 During the September Festival, we converted a small meeting room on the fifth floor of the TIFF Bell Lightbox into TIFF Studio 9, where we interviewed some of the world’s most talented and well-known actors and filmmakers, as well as many who deserve to be better known.
We rethought the TIFF audience journey from the ground up.
We created the TIFF Official Portrait Studio – first as an experiment, then more established as the years went on – both as a way for our audience to get a more intimate look at filmmakers and actors in attendance, and as a way to create valuable partnerships with companies like Apple and Huawei.
We created The Review, a weekly newsletter and online hub for great writing, video and audio content that gave our audiences a reason to come back.
Experiential + New Formats
We regularly initiated special projects to deepen the audience’s involvement with the TIFF brand:
POP 01, 02 + 03 – A sold out exhibition series
In the summer of 2016, the TIFF Digital Studio curated and built a three-part series of pop-up virtual reality showcases at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto featuring panel conversations hosted with media partners. We collaborated with diverse creators of experimental interactive works and partnered with amazing friends like The Verge. It let us share TIFF’s culture of experimentation and innovation and engage a new generation of media artists in our physical and digital spaces!
TIFF x Instagram Shorts Festival opened to acclaim and got over 4 million views for our program of 30 short films in just 11 days.
Film is not a medium that can or should be constrained to the big screen. In a new partnership with Instagram, we put the call out to filmmakers all around the world to enter their short films – 60 seconds or less – into our digital festival. The films we received (thousands of submissions, from more than 50 countries) were brilliant, beautiful, hilarious, miraculous. And the stories behind them were even better.
With jurors including Ava DuVernay, James Franco, Lake Bell, Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders, Director X and Bollywood super producer Karan Johar, our official selection of 25 films featured 40% female filmmakers, and featured a variety of genres, including documentary, animation, comedy and psychological-thriller. They premiered online, on screen and at Union Station in downtown Toronto.
I talked to Indiewire about it here.
We were recognized by the Webbys in three categories – we were honourees for our social media and nominated for both our TIFF x Instagram Shorts Festival and our live coverage of the Festival.
By the end we created a massive and deeply engaged audience across our digital channels, inviting people in Toronto and across the planet to share our love of film and give us their time and attention.