To sell 'Dracula Untold,' Universal asks you to add bats to your video

Bats. Bats everywhere.

As creepy as it may sound, Universal Pictures is hoping that giving people the ability to add virtual bats to their cellphone videos will get them talking about the new film Dracula Untold.

Social-media followers of the film, which arrives in theaters Oct. 10, will be prompted in the coming days to try an iOS app called Vivoom. Fans film a short scene, and the app then layers in the same digitally created bats seen in Dracula along with a banner for the movie at both ends. The bet is that the cool effect gets users to share that video on social media, expanding the number of people who hear about Dracula.

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FOR THE RECORD

11:59 p.m.: A previous version of this post said 17% of the people who saw In The Pink campaign videos started following the retailer on social media. The chain actually saw a 17% increase in the number of social media followers in the four-week run.

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Vivoom, a Cambridge, Mass., start-up, calls it advertising in user-generated content. For the movie studio, its the latest technology experiment aimed at remaining relevant among the YouTube generation.

The internal research and polls that we use shows that the higher the amount of organic conversation online about a movie, the better return there will be at the box office, said Doug Neil, Universals executive vice president for digital marketing. This is a concept we thought would be good to try expanding our presence on mobile.

Universal has also been tapping Los Angeles start-up Talenthouse to help market "Dracula Untold." And the studio is using Snapchat to generate buzz about the May 2015 release of "Pitch Perfect 2."

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To sell 'Dracula Untold,' Universal asks you to add bats to your video

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero