Universal and Fullscreen joined forces to give everyone the jitters before Oujia hits theaters on October 24. Leveraging an array of YouTubers like Kian Lawley, a member from O2L, Ricky Dillon, Jc Caylen and others, the campaign translated the suspense from Oujia onto YouTube while taking the YouTubers’ followers on a cross-social-network hunt for the wearabouts of a missing YouTuber.

It begins with  the YouTubers posting a video playing with an innocent oujia board. On October 5 some “found footage” was released on Kian Lawley’s YouTube channel showing he might be in dire straits. While usually active on all his Twitter and Snapchat, Lawley had practically disappeared.

 

It wasn’t until five days later when his worried followers finally heard from Lawley, but his followers still didn’t know where he was, but not without 17.3 million impressions of tweets to find him with #oujiawhereiskian:

Kian Lawley Oujia Chicago PartyFans gather for YouTubers and Oujia party.

The remaining YouTubers got together once more to hold a seance. The oujia led them to a haunted house in Chicago where 600 of their fans were gathered to celebrate his return.

The stunt generated over 5.6 milliion video views and more than 500,000 social engagements, crossing multiple social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Snapchat to tell the same story. In speaking to [a]listdaily, an executive from Universal said “These platforms were leveraged because of their over indexing against the target millennial audience for Ouija.  Promotions on these sites help to drive interest and awareness in the film.”

Indeed, Snapchat’s first ever ad was a promotion for the film as we reported yesterday. The focus on mobile-centric platforms was not an accident. “Mobile presence was critical for this film due to the high use and penetration of mobile devices for the film’s target audience,” said a Universal representative.

As the film is targeting the 12-24 year-old female audience, the inclusion of Snapchat was key. In speaking to Variety, Doug McNeil, Universal’s EVP of digital marketing spoke about the campaign’s focus on influencers and their cross-platform fanbases:

“It absolutely met our expectations, and it was the right execution creatively.”