Cracking the code on organic growth for Heretic in collaboration with Plaion Pictures
CASE STUDY Heretic
How to drive organic views for film spots while building a thriving horror fan community.
Objective
Cracking the code on organic growth for Heretic in collaboration with Plaion Pictures.
How to drive organic views for film spots while building a thriving horror fan community.
organic views
131k
completion rate
21%
Performance marketing needs a creative element to stay competitive, and it’s been highly insightful to work with Vievo. Seeing how custom audiences collected organically perform against data from other vendors has led to internal discussions on best practices and areas of focus for film marketing in 2025.
Andreas Bauer, Head of Online Marketing
Plaion Pictures
THE CHALLENGE
TikTok limits organic reach on content deemed "unoriginal," which is often a challenge for local distributors relying solely on subtitled or dubbed promotional materials. Plaion Pictures and Vievo have consistently collaborated to drive organic engagement for Plaion’s horror-specific fan community on TikTok. For the release of Heretic, Plaion sought creative ways to adapt the materials provided by A24 to resonate organically with audiences.
THE SOLUTION
The Vievo team, led by Alex and Anton, developed a creative concept centered on a "red flag counter" video format. The concept counted the number of “red flags” in the dialogue of Hugh Grant’s character, Mr. Reed, from selected clips.
Additionally, the team leveraged clever commentary from the Letterboxd community, which has become a fan-favorite source of inspiration. This approach resulted in four repurposed and original clips tailored to the campaign’s objectives.
THE RESULTS
The campaign generated $131K views.
The best-performing clip was the third and final part of the "red flag counter." At 55 seconds long, audiences watched an average of 22.6 seconds, with 20% of TikTok users watching the entire clip.
For comparison, the average completion rate for paid TikTok ads with durations over 45 seconds is typically around 2-3%.
lesson learned
TikTok’s Ad Frequency Gap
The number of ads on TikTok remains significantly lower compared to Meta, offering unique opportunities to stand out.
The Power of Organic + Paid Synergy
Combining organic content with paid campaigns yields better results than relying on paid strategies alone. Both engagement and completion rates for organic posts drastically outperform paid ads.