I spent this morning at the Cast & Crew screening of Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging, at the invitation of director Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham, Bride & Prejudice). I met her and her husband Paul on Thursday to discuss the forthcoming development of her own website, and she suggested that I toddle along to the screening this morning. So I did.
We've been working hard on the movie's marketing campaign over the past year or so, so I'd already glimpsed quite a lot of the characters in some shape or form. I was even fortunate enough to spend a day on set back in November of last year, filming a selection of original scripted material for use as part of our campaign. I blogged about the experience at the time, acknowledging how unusual it is for marketers to be given this kind of creative latitude so early in the process.
The film's still not out for another three and a half weeks, but we can already see our approach paying off in terms of the momentum the campaign has built up, at a point in the process where some online campaigns are still only just getting going.
Our long lead destination was an official Bebo profile we created for the character of Georgia. Bebo is traditionally very strong for exactly the same demographic as the book's core fans; teen girls, basically. Our intention was to harness Bebo's social networking tools to build a micro-community of fans and early adopters around the original content we'd produced, released over the course of the campaign as webisodes. Last time I looked, six months on, Georgia had over 4,000 friends, and the profile had been viewed almost 60,000 times.
Our strategy for the latter stages of the campaign has been to look at how we can widen this core awareness and anticipation into mainstream appeal. Certainly the official website we developed - one of my favourite examples of PPC's work from the seven years I've been there - is seeing levels of traffic suggesting that we've already succeeded in doing so.
Add to this the official widget (up there at the top of this post), a MySpace page for the band in the movie, The Stiff Dylans, and the forthcoming online advertising campaign (including a direct spend on Bebo) and you have the key constituents of what I immodestly consider to be a hugely progressive online marketing campaign.
What it really reinforces for me, which may seem blindingly obvious but is so often forgotten, is that online isn't something to sit behind the more traditional strands of the marketing process, such as the production of the trailer, or the design of a poster.
As a director who is prepared to entrust her movie into the hands of the distributor - and their agency - at an early stage, Gurinder is in good company; both JJ Abrams and Zack Snyder have shown that this can be an effective approach when applied to major Hollywood releases. As their currency continues to grow, and a generation of more traditional directors fall away, expect more online campaigns to start the moment a movie goes into production, and end only once the last sequel has been made, and the last DVD sold.
So this is new. It's the brainchild of Seesmic, Fox and Gia Milinovich, the latter being a blogger friend and collaborator on the Indy 4 video junket:
The embeddable version of Seesmic is a bit clunky generally, but what does that matter? What's of interest is that this is a smart little mash-up of that stalwart unit of movie marketing currency, the trailer, and the current trend for (pseudo-)threaded video conversations.
From what I understand the plan is to release a series of X-Files video clips and to drive online conversation and community around these through the player. It will be interesting to see how many 'X-philes' feel compelled to join the discussion, but from what Gia says this has already been embedded over 2,000 times, and I know from our own experiences working with movie widgets that this is a very respectable number, especially after such a short space of time.
CORRECTION: This stat actually refers to the text chat widget shown below, and the total figure is 2,300 at present, apparently:
Gia's been doing some very inventive things in the social media movie marketing space for some time, as you can see from her blog; she manages to keep a foot firmly in both camps, which is not always an easy thing to do. I've never been a major X-Files fan, but I still get a major kick out of seeing how the web can bring people together around a common interest, and create a new medium in which for them to share ideas and forge friendships.
I created this agent ID for little Rubes, who is a KAOS agent. When I get the chance I'll sign Lola up to CONTROL, and they can have their own little Quest for Parental Domination.
I grabbed this not because it's the nicest widget I've ever seen, but because I'm getting it MONTHS out from release, and I'm expecting it to give me all the juice on a movie I'm VERY excited about. Reinforces two things I already kind of knew - movie widgets are driven by video content, and 99% about turning up on time.
Last time I posted on my blog about a work project it was the faux torture we created in Seesmic to promote the release of UNTRACEABLE.I got a right ticking off from my mum next time I saw her, so I’ve since been reticent about posting anything work-related.
Dr Jan Light notwithstanding, I can’t resist posting an amalgam of stuff we’ve created for what looks like one of the movies of the summer.Such is my anticipation of IRON MAN that I declined the opportunity to attend a preview screening this morning, in order to be able to share the pleasure of watching it with Ems at Mile End Genesis once it’s out on general release.
Any self-respecting comic fan will tell you that Iron Man is simultaneously one of the coolest and one of the most complex superheroes.As a character he expresses a potent fusion of strength and speed, power and grace – made of iron, but powered by rocket fuel.His alter ego on the other hand, arms dealer Tony Stark, has traditionally been depicted as a symbol of human frailty as well as fortitude, through his battles with alcoholism and other personal difficulties. This being the case, Robert Downey Jr has always looked like an inspired bit of casting, and everything I'm hearing at the moment appears to confirm this. In fact, what I'm hearing is that it's just a GREAT movie, and that it should be right up there with the best of the Summer '08 blockbusters.
As far as our work on the campaign goes, there have been two principle strands; a widget, and a Second Life avatar.The widget is right here, and gives you an immediate opportunity to get a piece of the trailer:
In a few days this should automatically upgrade to the Mark 2 widget, currently going through the final approval process.This includes a bundle of movie content and a very cute little puzzle requiring you to assemble Iron Man’s electromagnetic battery in order to access some exclusive content we’ve created.
The avatar compliments this beautifully, being another way in which we’ve used social media to forge a stronger connection with fans.The avatar is currently being dispensed on PPC's Second Life island, Silverscreen, as part of a contest giving anyone the opportunity to win their share of L$125,000. That’s Linden Dollars by the way – the native currency of Second Life.It works out at about US $500.
Fans can enter the contest by creating a piece of jaw-dropping fan art, the only pre-requisite of which is that it must feature the avatar.What I love about it is creating an opportunity unique to this medium tapping into the relentless creative energy of typical Second Life residents, at a time when the hype bubble has undoubtedly burst and many of the early adopting corporate players have abandoned offices in virtual worlds shortly after their much vaunted arrival.I also love the fact that we got to create something that ROCKS this much.
We’re now working with the immensely affable Annie Ok, the ‘multimedia artist, video director and metaverse evangelist’ who has agreed to produce a machinima short showcasing the av.Annie is also bringing all sorts of extra value to the party on account of her many connections in this space, including the tantalising possibility of Iron Man writer Matt Fraction (currently working on the new Invincible Iron Man series) being on the contest’s judging panel.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve become very personally involved in some of the work we’ve done in Second Life over the last couple of years.It would have been difficult to avoid doing so, given that our promotions for 300, DIE HARD and TRANSFORMERS came virtually back-to-back and each required a fortnight of 18-hour working days to execute, punctuated by some moments of bewilderment and abject terror.
As is invariably the way, they are the projects that have truly defined my growth – and, I would suggest, the growth of our department – during that time.I like to think that PPC is now recognised as an agency ready to take on the challenges and realise the opportunities presented by social media, be it web 2.0 or web 3D, and that we’ve managed to become more relevant in the process.Insofar as that keeps things interesting and keeps me on my toes, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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DISCLOSURE: In case you've somehow managed to get through this entire post without digesting some fairly key details, I should point out that I'm working on the marketing of this movie in behalf of Paramount Pictures International, and that this may colour my judgement in terms of what you can expect. I haven't seen it though, so I'm going on my instincts as much as the next guy. Frankly, If I didn't think Iron Man was going to ROCK, I'd probably just blog about something else instead.
PPC's latest widget, promoting Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd for our friends at Warner Bros:
This is the third of the widget's we've created for WB, following on from Beowulf and I Am Legend. One nice touch is that the people who grabbed the widgets for these previous titles can update them to feature content for new movies.
Looks like Depp can sing a bit, and I never tire of Burton's style. Looking forward to watching it.
These aren't two of ours - want to get that clear straight up, so that nobody thinks I'm claiming them. Not too proud to admit that there are other people out there producing visionary grabbable goodness :)
The CLOVERFIELD widget is nice and simple, and, crucially, offers a really juicy five minute excerpt from the movie, along with a simple, clearly communicated incentive for people to spread the word.
It's just a shame for the rest of us that the chance to host an advance screening of the movie in your hometown is only available to "legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia and Canada (excluding the province of Quebec)". Damn those guys in Domestic have it easy.
The JUMPER widget also looks like part of the domestic campaign, although these things always spill over into international regardless. It's much simpler, but the point is it's out there early and grabbing eyeballs. Who knows what's to come as we get closer to the February release?
I'm pretty excited about both movies. CLOVERFIELD has always been pitched as a working title, but given how much buzz there is already around the movie I think they'd be crazy to change it. As for JUMPER, I'm really looking forward to seeing Hayden Christensen, Jamie Bell and Samuel L. Jackson under the direction of Doug Liman (THE BOURNE IDENTITY).
We've just wrapped another of our grabbable widgets - this one's to promote I AM LEGEND, and will be available as an automatic update for everybody who grabbed our BEOWULF widget.
Personally I hate the word 'widget', but it's rapidly becoming part of the lexicon of online marketing to describe these kind of embeddable applications. If you want one of the earliest examples of this kind of thing, and a strong indicator of how successful it can be, the proliferation of Youtube videos in their early days was driven by precisely this principle. In an age when everybody has their own little piece of screen estate somewhere on the web, all you have to do is give them something cool or useful enough and they'll do your advertising for you.
This is something we've been working on at PPC lately, recently pushed live. It's been once of those projects that's really stretched a few of us, but everybody - including the client - is really made up with the end result:
The content may seem like fairly obvious stuff, although the choice of backgrounds is a nice touch. But in terms of how far we've travelled since the days of the campaign microsite, this feels like a real milestone, and we have a nice slate of projects coming up where we should get to play with the format. Hope you like it. Hope you grab it. Hope you share it!
