Line revives a 12-year-old movie to pull at Indonesians’ heartstrings in this clever piece of viral marketing

Indonesian actress Dian Sastro, star of “Ada Apa Dengan Cinta.”

Indonesia doesn’t have a Super Bowl to showcase the year’s cleverest advertising, but it does have a strong romance film audience. Japanese chat app and social network Line is well-known in the archipelago for its ability to use cuteness as a marketing strategy. But this time, Line has tried something different. The app previously known for its adorable stickers and 30 million local users has now tapped into something even more fundamental to Indonesian culture: drama films.

Last week, Line published a 10-minute long YouTube video that served as a mini sequel to a 12-year-old, iconic Indonesian romance movie titled “Ada Apa Dengan Cinta?” (“What’s With Love?”). The video was meant to promote Line’s Alumni feature that lets long lost acquaintances (or in this case, teen lovers) reconnect. According to Google Trends, the video went extremely viral in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Twitter hashtag #AADC2014 became one of the nation’s highest trending topics of the week.

Localizing with love

The 2002 romantic drama stars local celebrities Dian Sastro, Nicholas Saputra, and Titi Kamal, three now-widely recognized actors in the archipelago. The film was important to Indonesia’s cinema scene, becoming widely-known as a movie that sparked the now-successful “teen” genre in Indonesia (think “10 Things I Hate About You” for a western equivalent).

At the end of the film, the two high school protagonists are separated by circumstance, when the boy (Saputra) must go to school in the US, and the girl (Sastro) is forced to remain in Jakarta. In Line’s YouTube sequel, the lovers reconnect and rekindle their flame via Line Alumni.

See: With celebrity support, Setipe wants to modernize Indonesia’s dating scene

Reaching an elusive demographic with teen nostalgia

Line has done something very out of the ordinary by choosing to utilize a 12-year-old film for marketing to a now tech-savvy audience in 2014. Actually, it’s brilliant. The target audience Line is reaching through this video is the segment of Indonesians who were teenagers a decade ago and who are almost all technologically inclined.

Movies like “Ada Apa Dengan Cinta” pose interesting and subtle opportunities for local brands interested in viral video marketing, as the film’s ending was left with a seemingly unfinished storyline: The teen lovers couldn’t be together.

Although Line claimed US$120 million in revenue at the end of last year, it can still be interpreted as a bold move to spend its marketing budget on reuniting several Indonesian actors for one short video. However, based on the clip’s eruption of social media traffic, shares, and subsequent memes, Line’s strategy has hit the mark.

Bandwagon branding

After the video went up, several international conglomerates followed Line’s lead and piggybacked on the video’s virality. Brands like Coca Cola, Indomie, XL Axiata, and Heineken promptly came out with tweets and memes that also related to Line’s mini sequel.

The idea of reaching into the past memories of a target demographic for modern marketing is something international brands in developed economies should also replicate. Imagine the attention US telecommunications firm AT&T could pull in by posting a YouTube video of Kate Winslet discovering that Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t actually freeze to death in the Atlantic Ocean. Brands with deep pockets would do well to take notes from Line’s strategy in Indonesia, and film-goers would do well to keep their eyes peeled for more videos like this to come.