Borat 2: How Sacha Baron Cohen Hit a Homerun With Social Media to Promote His Movie

For the last 14 years, fans have been long awaiting a sequel to the movie that had them laughing their socks off. The reason the sequel took 14 years to implement was because Sacha Baron Cohen wanted to release it at a perfect time and make sure it wasn’t rushed. This led to some confusion among fans when they found out the movie was to be filmed and released during the Covid-19 pandemic. People questioned if the environment would make for the best movie possible, and whether it would affect Sacha’s ability to properly promote the movie.

As Sacha couldn’t interact with his fans in person, he realized that he would need to take a different approach to promoting his new movie film. The day after the film was released, Borat participated in a 30 minute Q and A interacting with his fans on the Amazon Prime Video YouTube account. Borat fans could directly ask him questions via Zoom with Sacha acting in his Borat character the entire time. This was an incredibly successful marketing approach, as fans got to form a personal connection with Borat virtually. Today, the YouTube video has 835,000 views and has drawn many people towards the movie.

Sacha also realized that he needed to find other unique ways to reach his target market. For this reason, he went on Youtube sensation David Dobrik’s YouTube channel to promote the movie days before it came out. Sacha realized the reach that David had, and thought it would be an effective way to reach his target consumer during the pandemic. To make the video more relatable, Borat surprised one of David’s friends, Suzy, who was a big fan of the movie. Suzy’s immense excitement in her reaction symbolized how excited fans were to see the movie all around the world. The Youtube video has nearly 11.5 million views and took the world by storm as David Dobrik hadn’t posted in months due to Covid-19. Using David’s platform was a great way for Sacha to attract the Gen-Z audience towards his new movie.

As you can see, Sacha found unique ways to market his movie during the pandemic. He realized that reaching his target demographic may be harder, so he turned to social media, something he didn’t do while promoting the first movie. Borat even created his own personalized social media accounts on Instagram and Twitter to interact with fans. Other promotional tactics Sacha participated in includes being interviewed by Jimmy Fallon, and posting billboards across the country. These promotional tactics lead to the film having immense success. In the film’s opening weekend alone, over ten million people watched the movie on Amazon Prime. The movie reached nearly 1.6 million households within the first weekend, topping the record Mulan set on Disney Plus over Labour Day weekend. From these numbers, it is evident that the social media tactics Sacha used worked, and that films can be promoted successfully during a pandemic.

LINKS

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