Front row access to the hottest ticket in town, in a way that only E! News can offer. Our dynamic, pop-cultured hosts (Justin Sylvester and Zuri Hall) live their best lives at the Wicked Los Angeles premiere, offering up exclusive red carpet access and all-around good vibes. Celebratory interviews with the film’s stars, crew, and VIP guests are organic, fun, and meant to create immediately shareable social moments catering to the Wicked fandom. Authentic reactions are what the internet is all about – and our livestream hosts are all about making them!
This premium livestream reflects the high energy of the event with dynamic, immersive shots of attendee arrivals, step-and-repeat posing, and our key interview position on the red carpet. Wherever the action is, we’ll take you there!
Supplementing our live coverage are short, energetic packages – including brand integrations, a tour of the venue, the making of Wicked, and more – providing viewers exclusive sneak peeks and amplifying excitement around the film.
A live environment is virtually uncontrollable, but our team worked hard to meet the demands of an ever-changing situation. Our key to success was a mountain of pre-production work to help maximize preparedness for every scenario. This meant a series of tech rehearsals to ensure equipment and lines of communication were up to standard, and an extensive, modular creative rundown that would allow us to pivot and maintain as much of a proactive (versus reactive) stance throughout the run of the show. One of our stars is running late? No problem, we’ve got two interviews banked and a behind-the-scenes package ready to run while we wait.
Our partnership with Fandango and Universal allowed access to various creative and behind-the-scenes footage from the film, which we in turn were able to use to create these packages to supplement our live coverage. An interview with Paul Tazewell (Oscar-nominated Costume Designer for the film) yielded an episode of E! News’s By Design where we went deep on the inspiration behind the costumes, while our junket position lead to a fun package where the cast played a game of “Most Likely To...” (and we discovered who was most likely to act like their character in real life).
Our pre-production process also allowed for in-the-moment creative pivots. Say a solo interview suddenly becomes a joint interview, or a star is taking their time making their way to the interview platform: our team was ready with a fresh batch of questions or a sleek, minimal-footprinted jib camera angle to ensure the stream was both visually and creatively interesting to our audience. Additionally, we integrated cross-platform promotion as we pulled in our E! @ Wicked Premiere CreatorCam feed live to our Livestream viewers and allowed our hosts from both feeds to communicate and share their experiences on the carpet.
As a digital outlet, we follow the mandate of creating cost-effective premium DTC content that satisfies a rapidly evolving audience. In the vein of E!’s classic Live from the Red Carpet coverage, the E! @ Wicked Premiere Livestream brought this traditional all-access pass to one of Hollywood’s hottest premieres into the digital age. In doing so, we were able to engage a vast network of digital distribution and serve the show in real-time to 22 platforms domestically, and 60 platforms worldwide, yielding a captive live audience of nearly 500k livestream views. We then amplified the livestream with a 360 digital and social VOD strategy to hit over 58 million VOD video views. From the POV of both audience engagement and as a test for our team’s capabilities, the E! @ Wicked Premiere Livestream was a resounding success.
