Movie Marketing Madness: Knight and Day

Charm can get you a long way down the road. Turn on a smile and keep up the banter and before you know it you can make off with the diamonds, kill enough time so whoever you’re talking to forgets they were mad at you and accomplish a variety of other goals. Oh sure there comes a time when you have to ante up and deliver the goods, but (as many social media “experts” know) charm will keep you in the room long enough to collect your consulting fee and before a client realizes you’ve just caused them more problems and that they need a real agency partner.

I may have gone off on a digression there. Where were we?

Charm can also convince people to see a movie. Or, more specifically, a marketing campaign containing the promise of a movie filled with lots of charm can convince people to see said movie. That’s why the campaign for Knight and Day is filled with just that.

The movie stars Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz as the conveyors of said charm. Cruise plays some sort of vaguely defined government operative with super ninja combat skills who must keep some sort of MacGuffin out of the hands of the bad guys, even the bad guys within the agency he used to work for. While he’s doing that he pairs up with Diaz’s character, a normal non-espionage trained woman who gets caught up in the whirlwind of action around Cruise’s spy.

The Posters

The teaser poster certainly struck a clear 70′s vibe that, and this might just be because of the inclusion of Diaz, reminded me of something you’d see in a promotion for the original “Charlie’s Angels.” The silhouettes with guns visible against the bright orange and yellow splashes all just scream to be rendered in blacklight and stuck on someone’s dorm room wall circa 1973.

The later poster…actually, there was no later poster. That’s it. The sum and total of the poster campaign is a one-sheet that is all groovy graphics without any appearance by the stars themselves. Wow.

The Trailers

It’s obvious from the first trailer that the studio is selling this as a fun thrill ride that coasts breezily on the charms of both Cruise, who’s in full boyish grin mode here, and Diaz, who’s performance seems to be based almost solely on reacting to the goings on around her.

The spot starts off with the meeting between the two characters in an airport and their eventual travels on an airplane occupied solely by the two of them and a batch of terrorists or something. Cruise dispatches of the bad guys while Diaz is indisposed and they crash land the plane and go their separate ways, only for Cruise to later seek out Diaz and tell her how her involvement isn’t yet over. They have to stick together for reasons the trailer doesn’t feel the need to make clear, which then leads to a handful of situations that put the pair in dangerous situations, with Diaz getting in the way of Cruise’s carefully laid out plans and providing lots of opportunities for Diaz to scream and hide behind something.

It’s a fast-moving and fun trailer that doesn’t allow the audience to ask too many questions in the moment by virtue of that fast pace, which is designed to keep the laughs and the actions coming while providing only the barest of plot outlines. Instead of spoiling the story, the trailer simply asks the audience to make their decision to see the film based on their familiarity with the actors and the promise of a good time for both men (based on the action) and women (based on the comedy and the personal issues Diaz’s character seems to be dealing with).

The second trailer released was fairly indistinguishable from the first. There are a couple new scenes thrown in but by and large it hits the same notes as the earlier version.

Online

The movie’s official site opens with a full-screen presentation of the trailer, with the character silhouettes flanking the screen. The content navigation is to the left and stops the video as soon as you click on something and restarts from where you left off when you close the section you’ve clicked in to.

First is “Story” which has a very brief – two sentences – synopsis of the movie’s plot, a synopsis that uses “sexy” within the first three words.

“Video” just has one of the trailers and “Images” has a scant three stills from the movie.

Still labeled as under development is the “Cast & Crew” section while “Downloads” has a Desktop wallpaper of the movie’s key art and a half dozen IM icons.

In an effort to get people to watch the trailer again and actually engage with it, a “Game” was developed that prompted people to shoot at the trailer in order to stay alive. Graphics appeared on the screen showing what actions to take and if you didn’t your screen became more and more cracked until you died. It’s an interesting concept and one that I could see being used in other ways for specific elements of other campaigns.

The movie’s Facebook page has lots of updates on the movie’s publicity tour and other information as well as an app for people to add to their profile involving a quiz asking how well they know their friends. A Twitter profile also kept people up to date on the movie’s happenings.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

No cross-promotions or partners to speak of, though there was an extensive TV and online advertising campaign run that I saw. The TV spots all played out like mini trailers and put the spotlight on what a sexy, action filled time the movie was going to be for everyone. Online ads used video elements where they could and generally otherwise recreated the poster key art.

Media and Publicity

Since it was one of the few original movies on this summer release schedule – meaning it’s not a sequel, remake or obvious franchise kick-off – the very fact that it got made became a news story (New York Times, 4/14/10) in and of itself. If you read the story you’ll see the finished product only barely resembles the original pitch or any of its subsequent iterations and might actually be the better for it.

Cruise revisited one of his best recent roles, that of Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, in promotions for the 2010 MTV Movie Awards that had the character on the set of Risky Business and making the decision that a scene would work better if a much younger Tom Cruise lost the pants before sliding on the floor to the sounds of “Old Time Rock & Roll.” There were more as well, including one of Grossman chiding the stars of Twilight and so on.

Diaz tried to create a little bit of buzz by using some slang for male genitalia and the lengths she’s gone to in order to secure some in Playboy. The less said about this the better.

There were also two weak attempts at creating viral videos for the movie and generate some some word-of-mouth. One involved showing rehearsal footage featuring Cruise and Diaz and the other, released right around the time of the World Cup, showed them playing soccer on the set. The latter was particularly egregious because of the badly CGI’d soccer ball in the video.

To kick-start what seemed to be a general lack of word-of-mouth and compensate for what was see to be weak tracking, Fox ran a series of early sneaks of the movie around the country the weekend before the official opening, a tactic that seems to have resulted in generally positive buzz. Though whether it was enough to get people out remained to be seen.

Overall

I’m conflicted about this. The trailers are an awful lot of fun and, as I stated in the introduction, certainly bring the charm needed to sell the audience on the idea that an action romance starring these two actors would be a good time at the theater. So that element of the campaign along with the derivatives such as the TV spots work pretty well.

But then there’s the issue of there being just one poster – and one that nowhere shows the faces of these two stars – and a website that contains almost nothing. Those are two big, gaping holes in the campaign. While there doesn’t seem to be mass public confusion about who stars in the movie, it’s helpful to remember that marketing campaigns are as much about assuaging the egos of those involved as anything else so it seems unusual that the two stars wouldn’t be front and center on a one-sheet. So ultimately the campaign comes off as odd because of those missing pieces.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

• 06/28/10: Fox co-marketing chief Tony Sella falls on the sword for the movie’s disappointing box-office but defends his star-less posters and bi-polar advertising push.

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