Communications & Reach
Reflect on reality
As in previous years, the aim of IDFA’s marketing & communications department is to reach a large and diverse audience, both within Amsterdam and the international circuit of industry professionals. In 2019, we continued to position the organization as an institute that “provokes boundless curiosity,” as laid out in the previous year. For the third year in a row, creative agency KesselsKramer provided the festival campaign, this time inviting visitors to reflect on reality, society, history, and the future—each version of the slogan referring to a different aspect of the festival, from the more history-oriented focus programs to the new media program IDFA DocLab. The year saw an unprecedented diversity in press coverage of the festival. Household brands Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were present at the festival, as were trade magazines Filmkommentaren, Screen International and CineEuropa. For multiple weeks, IDFA was featured in Dutch primetime TV talk shows.
But not only Western Europe and the U.S. picked up on the IDFA buzz: news outlets from over 105 countries reported on IDFA in 2019, ranging from Iranian documentary blogs to Chilean community outlets. The reach of IDFA’s online media proceeded to grow across all platforms in 2019. IDFA.nl, which remains our most important marketing and communications tool, saw a 28% increase to 968,422 visits in 2019. Not only festival-related traffic accounts for this number: some 800 IDFA collection films can be watched online for free or for a small fee, attracting a larger number of viewers annually. Specific themes, topics of interest, and developments in global news were taken as opportunities throughout the year to highlight relevant films from the online collection on our flagship website and social media channels. On social media, IDFA engages an increasingly larger audience: Facebook now reaches 86,000 fans, Twitter has around 50,000 followers, and Instagram grew from 9,000 to 13,800 followers in less than a year—providing valuable leads to a potentially younger audience.
Audience reach: 292,870 visits
Social media
85,153 Facebook followers 61,341 Twitter followers 13,800 Instagram followers
Website
971,558 users 1,630,457 sessions 8,712,699 unique page views
Publications
5,790 mentions in global media 105 countries where IDFA received coverage
App
9,400 app users