Success of High School Musical in the Global Market
3. Why is HSM so successful in global markets?
The soundtrack of the Disney original movie “High School Musical” was released in January 2006, debuting near the bottom of the Top 200 in the United States.
Seven weeks later, after the Disney Channel premiere of the movie, it hit #1.
Disney knew that the movie was going to be big, but no one could expect that this musical, with a cast of six unknown actors would become a worldwide phenomenon.
The promotion of the movie started on New Year’s Eve in Disney Channel, introducing the cast and playing some musical segments of the movie as music videos advertising the movie premiere in January. It continued with free downloads of the #1 single “Breaking free”, 4 singles on heavy rotation in the 56 Radio Disney stations and making the lyrics of all the songs available on disneychannel.com.
The story, described as a modern “Romeo and Juliet” via “Grease” it’s a true musical set in a High School, and there hasn’t been anything like that since Grease. Furthermore, the targeted age for the movie (8-14) was living in a generation extremely connected to the internet, and the movie came out exactly in the right time, just after Christmas when so many iPods and iTunes gift cards were sold and this age group was hungry for content for their iPods.
The international release came months later following the same strategy, but in a “think global, act local” way. The movie was translated to 30 languages, adapting to the 290 million viewers in the 100 countries were it was shown, there were adaptations of the lead singles by local bands and singing in the local language, and in some countries like India even the soundtrack was dubbed, making it 100% Hindi.
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Article I : http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1525204/what-high-school-musical-anyway.jhtml Article II (I HAVEN´T USED THIS ONE YET BUT WE COULD):
The soundtrack of the Disney original movie “High School Musical” was released in January 2006, debuting near the bottom of the Top 200 in the United States.
Seven weeks later, after the Disney Channel premiere of the movie, it hit #1.
Disney knew that the movie was going to be big, but no one could expect that this musical, with a cast of six unknown actors would become a worldwide phenomenon.
The promotion of the movie started on New Year’s Eve in Disney Channel, introducing the cast and playing some musical segments of the movie as music videos advertising the movie premiere in January. It continued with free downloads of the #1 single “Breaking free”, 4 singles on heavy rotation in the 56 Radio Disney stations and making the lyrics of all the songs available on disneychannel.com.
The story, described as a modern “Romeo and Juliet” via “Grease” it’s a true musical set in a High School, and there hasn’t been anything like that since Grease. Furthermore, the targeted age for the movie (8-14) was living in a generation extremely connected to the internet, and the movie came out exactly in the right time, just after Christmas when so many iPods and iTunes gift cards were sold and this age group was hungry for content for their iPods.
The international release came months later following the same strategy, but in a “think global, act local” way. The movie was translated to 30 languages, adapting to the 290 million viewers in the 100 countries were it was shown, there were adaptations of the lead singles by local bands and singing in the local language, and in some countries like India even the soundtrack was dubbed, making it 100% Hindi.
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Article I : http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1525204/what-high-school-musical-anyway.jhtml Article II (I HAVEN´T USED THIS ONE YET BUT WE COULD):