The way to market a movie

I wrote a few months back about the ingenious trailer for the now-named Cloverfield movie, featuring a hand-held camera of a party which gets rudely interrupted by a mysterious large monster crashing through downtown New York. Giving only the date of release, interested viewers are intrigued enough to track down hints and clues on a variety of websites, set up forums discussing their findings and hypotheses, and basically work themselves into a frenzy over the upcoming movie.

Basically it’s the viral concept, carefully crafted into a marketing strategy that has been wildly successful in this instance. It helps that the man responsible for the movie is also well-known for his series Lost, who drops tantalizing hints onto websites, into episodes, on DVDs, online games and various other places to keep the storyline as complex and engaging as possible.

But I think the real discovery here is the idea of personal investment in one’s characters. In Lost, the viewer slowly uncovers the histories of the characters, and through personal effort (the “search”) finds out more about each person so that the character feels real to the viewer and also very personal. The triumph of solving a puzzle or searching down a clue involves the viewer and requires the kind of personal investment that puts them into the storyline, almost as if they really know the people involved and are trying to help them in real-time.

In Cloverfield, the viewers are able to find videos, photos and information about various characters and their relationships with each other, in real-time, leading up to the movie’s release so that by then they’ve been experiencing this storyline for months and can’t wait to find out what happens to their friends. Truly genius, and an important mantra for advertisers: get your audience personally invested in your product, and you’ve got a winner.

Here’s a very thorough recap of the entire marketing effort on Movie Marketing Madness. Very much worth a read.

Found on AdFreak via Twitter.

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Chocolate gets a bit weird

Cadbury has released a new campaign featuring everyone’s favorite creme egg getting suicidal. Apparently the point is to get to the best part – the “goo” – as quickly as possible. Spots include the little egg shucking its foil wrapper before placing its fragile little body purposely in the path of falling books and meat tenderizers, catapulting itself into a wall using a trash can lid, leaping through an egg slicer, getting drawn and “halved” by a pair of horses, and melting itself in front of a blow dryer.

On the Cadbury website, the poor deranged egg is put through further self-torture behind the door of the “Goo-ology” Research Centre. First the egg throws itself under the knocker as the viewer tries to enter, and then it can be found on a psychologist’s couch while mini versions of itself find ever more creative ways to smash themselves in the background, tidily cleaned up afterward by an egg in an apron with a vacuum. A range of games, quizzes, contests and other “Goo”dies can be found by pulling down the “egg chart” and examining its various mental problems.

I find it all a bit grotesque, though funny – but I’m not sure it does the job of making me want to eat the creme eggs, even though I absolutely love the sticky sugar-bomb. I actually feel a bit sorry for the little egg, I wonder why it wants to end it all (besides the possibility that its life’s only ambition is to be eaten by someone who is more interested in the creme filling than in the chocolate on the outside).

So I wonder about this campaign – is it really a good idea to sell a food product in a way that makes the viewer feel sorry for it? Or will the off-kilter silliness be enough to get people to buy creme eggs for their Easter baskets in droves?

Found on Creativity Online.

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The Return of Lost

Ok so this isn’t quite fair… it’s not exactly about advertising, and I’m posting it mainly because I am totally addicted to this show. But anyone who has kept up with Lost for the last few years knows that it’s returning at the end of this month. While my significant other is making it a point to avoid all the teaser previews (think fingers in the ears La-La-La kind of avoidance), I am looking for any scrap of news that will give me my Lost fix until the season premiere.

So it’s not exactly cheating if I find one of those scraps on another advertising blog, is it? Earlier this week AdFreak posted an entry about a new promotional game called Find 815. It’s based on a set of characters that are not recognized from the show: a guy who used to work for Oceanic Airlines, and his search for his girlfriend who was a flight attendant on the doomed airplane. Her name is Sonya and I can’t remember if she was one of the survivors or not – but if the writers want to tie in the game to the show, they never hesitate to pull out some random new character and claim that they were extras the whole time. So of course I’m now checking in on this online flash game every day, playing the little puzzles, clicking on pictures and searching for all the little hidden goodies that no doubt someone smarter than me will find a lot quicker.

One clever advertising move – often the game spits you out onto their partner network site (ABC) to play one of the puzzles. Of course this increases traffic to their website and offers a chance to advertise other shows. Not all is lost when entertainment can pull double-duty like that.

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2007 – a year of freaky ads

Ad Freak is holding a contest to choose the freakiest ad of 2007. Checking the list they’ve got so far, there were quite a few. Advertisers are always looking for new ways to get their products noticed, but some of them stoop to such low levels to get attention that I wonder how they thought it could possibly be good for their product image. From the creepy undead Orville Redenbacher to a guy licking bird poop off his car, the yikes moments turned me off to more than one brand. But it certainly makes for a fun look back at the year of advertising! Enter your votes here, and enjoy catching the few weird spots that you haven’t already seen.

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Blowing stuff up

Dell’s new ad for the XPS One shows an art-installation-type white room with a variety of computer hardware on strategically placed pedestals. Within a few seconds each piece of hardware meets its explosive demise, either by blowing up, falling from the ceiling or getting smashed by a shiny new wrecking ball, leaving only the beautiful new XPS One sitting unharmed in the middle of the wreckage. All is edited in slow motion to capture each explosive detail, with a soundtrack of “Que Sera Sera.”

So, besides the giddy, geeky thrill that I get out of these kinds of commercials where a series of events is set to occur with balletic precision and the film makers get to play with explosives, I wonder what exactly they’re trying to say here. Clearly the visuals is saying out with the old, in with the new. But the song seems in counterpoint with that. “Whatever will be, will be.” Is that an expression of doubt as to how popular this computer might be, or is it the dying “oh well” of the older computers as they self-destruct in the face of new technology? “The future’s not ours to see.” Meaning… Dell sends its new model out into the world with crossed fingers for its success? It’s a pretty weak message if you ask me.

But I’m still a fan of the spot. Blowing stuff up is cool.

Found on Creativity Online.

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