Case Study · Social & Community · 2014–2019
Five Films.
One Community.
32 Million People.
LAIKA makes films by hand — twelve frames per second, four to six seconds of footage per week. The studio had extraordinary things to show. The challenge was learning the difference between what the studio found impressive and what an audience found meaningful.
212
Posts across 4 communities
£0
Paid media spend
4.58%
Engagement rate
152,968
Community members built
32.6M
People reached organically
The Challenge
I came to this with no social media playbook and no existing community infrastructure to build on. The studio's marketing instinct — refined across decades of traditional film marketing — was to explain the craft: facts, figures, technical achievements. The data told a different story from the very first posts.
The studio found its own work impressive. Audiences needed to discover it. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as the same thing is one of the most common mistakes creative organisations make with content marketing. The instinct to educate — to explain why something is special, to make the case for it — is almost always the wrong instinct. People don't fall in love with things that are explained to them. They fall in love with things they discover for themselves.
This is not a stop-motion problem. It is a universal one. The organisation that has worked hardest on something is almost always the worst judge of how to share it, because the people inside it can no longer remember what it felt like not to know.
Image — The Challenge
Thousands of individual pieces. For a world on screen for a few seconds. ©LAIKA LLC
01
The Studio Tour Question
When Dan Heale and the Way to Blue team came to LAIKA to begin the social strategy work, we gave them a studio tour first. The reaction was the same as every visitor's — overwhelmed silence, then disbelief, then something that looked like joy. By the end, Dan Pascall (Marketing Production Manager) and I were half joking: "if you could bottle that feeling, the films would sell themselves."
That joke became the strategy. What if a social presence could recreate, for someone sitting at home who would never visit Portland, something close to the feeling of walking through that studio?
"The studio's instinct is always to explain. The community's need is always to discover."
02
Test, Measure, Adjust
The first posts shared what we found impressive: the number of individual bolts in a character armature, the yards of yarn in a single costume. The data came back flat. People acknowledged the facts. They didn't feel them.
Then we showed the popcorn trees — the Coraline cherry blossom orchard built from wire armatures, carved foam, silicon, and painted pink popcorn. Thousands of pieces, for a world on screen for a few seconds. The response was in another category entirely. That single piece of data redirected the entire strategy. The craft was the caption. It didn't need explanation.
03
Audience Segmentation
Through iterative testing, we identified three distinct audience segments, each requiring different content at different cadences:
The Craft Audience. Connected at a values level with the commitment to building physical worlds by hand. Cared as much about how it was made as what was made.
The Character Audience. Drawn to the emotional complexity of the characters — more three-dimensional than most animation audiences expected.
The Curiosity Audience. Driven by the "how did they do that" response. Time-lapse content was the most powerful format for this group — weeks or months of irreversible, meticulous work compressed into thirty seconds or less. The most effective versions kept the characters moving at real time while the animators' hands moved at speed, creating a visual contrast that made the scale of the work viscerally apparent in a way that no static image or written description could. That contrast — human effort made visible against the illusion of natural movement — was what drove sharing.
04
The Valentine's Day Test
The campaign's most instructive moment came from a single post: Coraline and Norman together in the same frame for the first time — two characters from two different films. The characters couldn't behave like actors; they had to remain true to who they were in their films. The post became fan fiction held to the standard of character integrity of the films themselves.
2.49M
People reached by a single organic post. No paid media. Two characters. One frame.
Image — The Valentine's Day Test
Two characters. One frame. 2.49 million people reached. Organically. ©LAIKA LLC
05
The Results
Over six months, across 212 posts on four legacy film communities, the programme delivered 152,968 new community members and 32.6 million people reached — entirely organically, with zero paid media spend. For context: Hootsuite's industry benchmark data shows entertainment and media brands on Facebook averaging 1.75% engagement and Instagram averaging 3.70% — both well below the 4.58% we achieved organically.
The community proved its resilience when it mattered most. When a film underperformed commercially, the relationships built through years of authentic engagement gave the studio something real to lean on. A community built on genuine connection doesn't disappear when the opening weekend numbers aren't what you hoped.
References
Hootsuite Social Media Benchmarks (2025) — Entertainment and media industry benchmarks: Instagram engagement 3.70%, Facebook 2.60%. Used as the industry baseline against which the LAIKA Valentine's Day post (4.58%, organic) is measured.
Mills, M., Oghazi, P., Hultman, M. & Theotokis, A. (2022) — "The impact of brand communities on public and private brand loyalty: A field study in professional sports." Journal of Business Research, 144, 1077–1086. Brand community identification directly drives both public and private brand loyalty and fully mediates the relationship between brand identification and consumer behaviour.
What This demonstrates
Audience segmentation and content strategy at scale, without paid media infrastructure
Data-driven iteration in a creative environment resistant to measurement
Cross-functional partnership management — bridging studio production culture with external social strategy agency
Community building as commercial infrastructure, not just brand activity
The discipline to hold creative standards (character integrity) under commercial pressure