Hollywood for Theaters uses the well-known stars of series, movies and music who are available on Cameo as a means to reach a new audience for theaters. We used Cameo in a non-traditional way and achieved the experience that Hollywood stars talk about Hungarian theater dramas in social media.

The campaign is not envisionable without the use of social influencers, they are the heart of it.

We also used local influencers to amplify: the Cameo videos were shared by the local cast of the relevant theater plays (actors and directors) on their own social media, reaching their huge local followings.

2 years ago, the Hungarian government stopped its program that funds theaters. This means theaters never had to be profitable or make ends meet alone. Many theaters, in the countryside and in the capital, closed permanently as a result.

To survive, 6 of the biggest theaters banded together and created eTheater, a platform where people could buy tickets to the live performances, and also stream recorded ones.

The 6 theaters understood that now they needed new people to buy tickets: people who are not theater goers, but only consume pop culture. They needed a way to make them interested in their performances.

We needed to get non-theaters goers's attention and make theater appealing and exciting for them. They only consume pop culture, so we infiltrated that.

We got well-known Hollywood stars, who are familiar to our audience from their popular hits, movies, series and music to talk about what happens in a play by the non-traditional use of Cameo.

The Hollywood celebrity sends a message to one of the main characters of the play from another, thereby telling our audience the life event, or the main conflict that happens in the chosen theater drama.

We needed to get non-theaters goers's attention and make theater appealing and exciting for them. They only consume pop culture, so we infiltrated that.

We looked for Cameo artists that appear in the most popular and watched shows in Hungary, such as Breaking Bad, the Netflix film Falling for Christmas, Tarantino films, and other legends such as rapper Ice T who has a cult following in Hungary.

We ordered the Cameo videos from celebrities in the name of a main character, gave them clues about the main conflict in the drama and got them to address another main character. This way, the celebrity excites the audience about the main conflict and the situation of the drama.

Then, because Cameo can only be shared by a person, not by any organization, we had the local Hungarian cast or director of the play to share the Cameo message on their own personal Facebook page. All these Facebook pages had substantial followings, as these local theater actors and directors are household Hungarian names.

From then, the press picked it up and shared it further.

Record number of tickets sold: ticket sales to live performances went up 27%.

The campaign reached over 4 million people altogether, in a country of 10 million.

The ticket sales guaranteed a sold-out season for all the 6 theaters that created the eTheater platform.

Overall budget: the Cameo videos cost altogether 2,644 USD.

For media, there was no paid media, the press discovered the Cameo messages from the local influencers' own Facebook pages and started covering it from there.

In Hungary, the arts have always been state funded, as the country is too small to sustain the art insitutions. This is why, when the funding to theaters was stopped, theaters faced a challenge they never had to face before: operating in a market, and sustaining themselves. This was a shock to them and they had a real business problem, for the first time.