The Disney Princess Academy is back and this year there is more to it. The chosen girls can not only meet princesses but also feature on the television channel. Every little girl grows up around princesses and imagines herself as one. Based on this belief, the channel had started the Disney Princess Academy (DPA) last year where it went to five cities and made 1800 dreams come true. From six lakh registrations, 1800 girls got a chance to meet Cinderalla, Rapunzel and Snow White.
This year, DPA will host 3600 participants, where little girls will be able to get dressed as princesses and also take away their costumes. The event will also see workshops on tiara making, makeovers and ballroom dancing training. Eight girls – one girl from each of the eight cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune, Chandigarh and Kochi, will be chosen to feature on the channel.
Apart from running promotions on various mediums, DPA is also leveraging social media to get out the word. A Facebook app can help you get passes to the event. So, if you are a mother with daughters aged between 4 to 12 years, you and your daughter can stand a chance to be admitted to the Disney Princess Academy event, the live event at shopping malls across the eight cities.
There are three rounds in the Facebook contest. The first one is a memory game where you click on the tiles to find and match all the pairs of shoes. Somewhere there are Cinderalla’s glass slippers too. If you are able to find Cinderalla’s glass slippers first, you get bonus points. The second level features Ariel, the mermaid princess, where she is trying to collect pearls and shells in her basket.
Here you need to use the arrow keys to move the basket left and right and collect the falling shells and pearls. There are bonus points for collecting the falling pearls. The last round has some simple princess questions. Easy to solve with even little knowledge of Disney movies.
Maximum number of points on the leaderboard ensures an entry to the DPA event every week in the month-long contest.
The contest is being promoted on the 1.6 million strong Facebook page of Disney India, with cover photos and wall updates. However, the channel’s YouTube and Twitter pages have not been doing much for the DPA. In fact, the Twitter page seems to be abandoned as of February this year.
Connecting with little girls & their mothers
The campaign launched last year had a cool video about the new age princess, young girls could aspire to be. A video titled ‘I am a Princess’ celebrated qualities like being brave, kind, generous and compassionate in our daily lives. A Facebook app for the DPA featured Grooming Tips and Learning from movies, where girls could imbibe good attributes from the Disney princesses. A Twitter contest had invited users to tag the princess in their lives.
But this year, the focus is on the academy and giving an experiential feel of the brand. Which parent, particularly a mother, wouldn’t want her little girl to be dressed up as a princess, and dance like one? Definitely, a brand building campaign that will help Disney India promote its fairytales and princess related merchandise. What do you think?