Movie Marketing Madness: The American

Last year we saw George Clooney play a man who enjoys being a lone wolf. His character in Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, spent 320+ days in the air flying from one place to the next working on laying people off, for which he needed to be as dispassionate as possible about not just the damage he was inflicting on others but also his own life, which was filled with as few accouterments and connections as possible. He could move from one place to the next on a moment’s notice, get the job done and be out before the dust cleared.

His character in this week’s new release, The American, seems to bear more than a little resemblance to Bingham. In this movie, though, he plays a contract killer who works on his own much of the time. When he tries to take a vacation from the killing he winds up in a small Italian village where he tries to find some piece, befriending a priest and beginning a love affair with a beautiful woman. But the violence he’s perpetrated all his life follows him to this idyllic location and he finds himself not the hunter but the hunted.

The Posters

The poster is a wonderfully retro affair with its minimal use of color and other design elements. Clooney is front and center, running toward the camera with gun and in hand and a very stern look on his face. The combination of those two things and the loose suit he’s wearing give the audience the impression that he’s a spy or some other sort of similar operative. And the large woman’s face that forms the background makes it clear there’s a woman involved in the plot who, it can be safely assumed, is going to make life difficult for Clooney’s character.

The Trailers

The trailer is all about making Clooney seem as cool and collected as possible and it works on that front as well as presenting a compelling case for seeing the movie. We start out eavesdropping on a phone call between Clooney and someone else. Clooney wants out of his life, which we later see involves lots of violence, but he’s convinced to take one last job. So it’s off to Italy where we assume he’s stalking his prey but where he also meets not only a couple of beautiful ladies – who likely aren’t what they seem to be -but also an old priest who he strikes up a friendship with. It’s clear there’s danger in the air Clooney navigates around Europe and we see lots of high-power rifles being aimed and then lowered for any number of reasons.

We also get quite a bit of background on Clooney’s character, with his employer stating that he as a long list of enemies, a sequence showing him cleaning his weapon (not a metaphor) while the priest talks about him having the hands of a craftsman and other such hints. All in all it’s an effective trailer that does a good job of showing the movie as being a character study, albeit one with lots of action, sex and intrigue.

A second, much-shorter trailer – it was only 48 seconds long – really boiled the movie down to its essence: Clooney is some sort of high-precision assassin with someone gunning for him, a couple lovely ladies in the mix and a priest who he has an unusual friendship with. It’s awfully short, not much longer than a TV commercial, and so doesn’t break any new ground or really do much of anything that’s interesting other than show off those core three or so main selling points.

Online

The movie’s official website is actually quite a nice production.

The first content section is “The Story” and is where you’ll find a good overview of the movie’s plot and who all the characters are. Information on the people who portray those characters and then those behind the camera can be found under “Cast & Crew.”

There are about 20 stills from the movie, including a few with director Corbijn, in the “Photos” section. “Videos” has both trailers, a handful of TV Spots and some extended clips as well as a featurette.

More information on the movie can be found in “In Depth,” which has some Focus-produced articles that turn the spotlight on Clooney and Corbijn especially. There’s also the “News & Press” blog for the movie that has links to stories about the movie, a blog that confirms what I’ll say later that there wasn’t exactly a ton of press around the movie.

The official site also hosted a blog written by Corbijn that has him sharing updates from the set, talking about working with the actors and other anecdotes. Not surprisingly it features plenty of photos taken by Corbijn, all of which of course look great.

The movie’s Facebook page is pretty good as well, with plenty of updates about the movie’s marketing and other actives, with lots of people commenting that they’re excited about the movie coming out.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

For a movie that has a distinctly artistic feeling it was a little surprising to see a handful of TV spots created. I guess it shouldn’t have been considering Clooney is the star here. The spots present Clooney as some sort of mysterious character who has a troubling secret but the chase scenes seem to be an attempt to give it a Bourne-esque feel for the audience who might be more inclined to see him as an international man of mystery than as a troubled retiring assassin.

Media and Publicity

The movie got a bit of publicity but not the kind that preceded Up in the Air or some of Clooney’s other movies. Some of the bigger stories (outside of those about Clooney’s love life and other personal matters) included a look at just how vastly European the movie’s production truly was (Los Angeles Times, 8/29/10) and then, just before release, the fact that Clooney was awarded the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award (Hollywood Reporter, 7/21/10) for his efforts in that area, including the recent “Hope for Haiti” campaign.

Overall

There’s a lot to like about this campaign, mostly in the realm of its efficiency. What I mean by that is that each component of the campaign does a lot without there being a lot. So that one poster really makes an impact that you don’t notice there’s just the one. Likewise with the trailers – you don’t need that second one since the first does a good job of highlighting the major selling points of the movie without overdoing it.

The website is focused not on flash and sizzle but instead on just showing off what it’s going to take to sell the movie. While there may not be a lot of extras there is lots of information about the movie in the form of news stories and other write-ups that add depth to the marketing. So while it’s not the biggest scale of marketing – though there was plenty of TV advertising done in the last couple of weeks prior to release – it does convey its key messages pretty well. All that remains is to see if the right audience was listening.

Not sure how to take this…

I think this is kind of interesting.

I’ve been writing Movie Marketing Madness for over six years now and, while traffic to that site is alright, my posts there don’t get linked to very often and don’t seem to generate the sort of discussion I often hope they do.

But my occasional columns for AdAge, particularly the last three or so, seem to be big hits, generating a good amount of comments (one piece got about 25) and spurring some discussion of the topic I address on other blogs I respect a lot.

Could it be, despite what we’ve been told by so many new media evangelists, that there are still advantages to being featured in the traditional press?

(By the way, that last bit is sarcasm. I know there is and have never been one of the doubters of that. Just clarifying.)

QOTD: 8/25/10

Via Chicagoist:

Seriously, if Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” is the best the summer of 2010 can come up with were are all seriously fucked.

In support of the web-based backbone

(This was originally posted on Voce Nation a couple days ago)

By now I’m sure that just about everyone who’s interested in such matters has read – or at least heard a bit about – Chris Anderson’s latest treatise, the one where he declares “The Web is Dead.” In it Anderson makes the case that web-browsing is becoming anachronistic as more people begin using apps in one of a variety of touch-pad environments.

I get what Anderson is saying, but I think he’s making the rhetorical error of believing that there’s a true cultural shift happening because he sees app environments and developments make headlines and this is the experience he has with his friends and coworkers, most of whom are high-tech early adopters. You may recognize this thinking as being similar to that which had Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World being the biggest film of 2010 mere days before it limped to a fifth place finish its opening weekend. Anytime there’s a tight-knit community of enthusiasts who are largely agreeing with each other there’s the risk of extrapolating that group’s passion to the larger population.

We need to, in order to fully accept Anderson’s point, concede that apps in whatever form we’re talking about are different from the software-based programs that people have been using on their computers for 20 years or more. Which, substantively, they’re not. I download the Tweetdeck application to my Mac desktop and it uses the internet but not “the web,” a differentiation helpfully pointed out by Colin Crook in some internal back-and-forth within Voce on this topic. But the experience I have using the Tweetedeck app on my phone isn’t all that different from using that desktop software. Apps are simply the next evolution of software.

Is there a shift away from browser-based functionality? To some extent. People may use Evernote to draft a blog post that they then paste into the WordPress app on their iPad, all using the internet but never touching the web. I’m guessing, though, that outside of some people who think they can do their entire job for a week or more just on a tablet device that doesn’t encapsulate the experience the vast majority of people are having.

On the backend most of these things still have web-based components. The blog that post is displayed after that copy/paste process above is finished still exists on the web. Similarly it’s always been a ridiculous argument to say that feeds are what matters and not websites since those feeds need to be generated from a website in some manner or another.

Look even at Twitter. If you want to engage in an update-based conversation there you need to setup an account, which brings with it a web presence for your username. People may choose to interact via text message but that web presence is essential for publishing. With the introduction of “Fast Follow” it’s possible to follow a profile via text without going through the account creation process, but that’s consumption only. Publishing still requires the web.

Getting even more philosophical, there’s never really been a pure “web experience.” It’s always been through an application, whether that’s Netscape Navigator or Chrome. So the user experience has, to some extent, always been app-reliant.

Nick Gernert, who heads up our Platforms Services team, added the following as well:

The web is beautiful in that it’s platform agnostic. We make a website here and we know it’s going to be working on OS X, Windows, Linux, PS3, Wii, mobile device, whatever (safe for maybe a few browser inconsistencies). There’s a lot of comfort in that as a developer and a lot of efficiency to be gained as a result.

That can’t be said of apps currently. You make one thing for the iPhone, another for a BB, another for Android and yet another app for Mac and PC if you’d like desktop clients. While the experience of these apps can be great and increase your overall satisfaction with the service, they can become a bear to maintain because now you’re supporting five apps instead of one. Suddenly the potential beauty of your app can be its detriment when bugs arise or certain platforms are neglected over the more commonly used ones.

There are price considerations also that move beyond the philosophical and into more practical areas. Data charges are common which limit some usage of the very functions, including apps, that make a smart-phone so smart. And the phones themselves are still more expensive than many people can manage on top of the computer and web connection that allow them to send far-off grandparents pictures of Johnny’s first steps.

The bottom line is that the web isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Too many services count on it as the backbone of their infrastructure, some precisely because of the fact that it’s accessible regardless of the platform being used.

Movie Marketing Madness: The Switch

There’s a great line from When Harry Met Sally about waiting too long to have a baby. While she’s telling her girlfriends over lunch that she’s left her longtime boyfriend because he didn’t want a family, one of Sally’s friends points out that her biological clock must be ticking. But Sally corrects her and points out that, no, the clock doesn’t really start ticking for another four or five years. My guess is that had she not then gotten around to dating – and eventually marrying – Harry she would have said something similar three or four years down the road.

Unwilling to wait until the clock really starts ticking (or maybe because it already has) is Jennifer Aniston’s character in the new movie The Switch. Aniston plays a woman who is tired of not being able to settle down in a relationship with a guy and so decides to have a baby through artificial insemination. This comes as quite a shock to her best friend (Jason Bateman) who has harbored an unrequited love for her for a dozen years. But after drinking too much at a shower of sorts he accidentally spills the “material” she was going to use and, in a drunk panic, replaces it with his own, though he doesn’t remember doing so the next morning. After she does indeed become pregnant the movie skips six years or so and the similarities between the child and himself begin to become evident, potentially providing the catalyst for the two friends to finally get together.

The Posters

The movie’s one poster is pretty simple, adopting the tri-stripe deign that has plagued hundreds of other one-sheets. Aniston gets the top slot, adopting a shocked expression that is designed to make us think something she just. cant. believe is going on off-camera. This is a familiar expression for Aniston, one that’s immediately recognizable from countless episodes of “Friends,” usually resulting from something Ross was doing to try and win her heart.

The bottom is given to Bateman, who’s grimacing while holding a sample cup. If you’ve watched the trailer you know he’s considering what to do with the suddenly empty cup but unfortunately on the poster he looks like he’s weighing how disgusting it might be to take a shot of whatever’s in there.

The poster sells the stars primarily and counts on the audience finding their ability to react to things in a funny way attractive. The copy about it being “The most unexpected comedy ever conceived” works a little too hard to sell the pregnancy angle but without a solid visual to hand on to it does what it can.

The Trailers

The first trailer is utterly predictable and spells out just about every imaginable key moment from the movie itself but is still fairly funny, thanks largely to the efforts of Bateman.

We meet Bateman’s and Aniston’s characters and get a quick insight into their relationship, which is that of long-time friends despite Bateman having feelings for her that he’s never expressed. So he’s supportive if disappointed when Aniston announces she’s planning to be artificially inseminated by a stranger. But an accident in the bathroom with the sample leaves a drunk Bateman with a decision to make, one he doesn’t remember the next day. Cut to seven years later when the resulting child now six years old and Aniston moves back to New York, resulting in Bateman realizing what he did and trying to figure out how to deal with that.

It’s funny enough but doesn’t really leave a whole lot to the imagination, which is likely the point as movies like this need to be as familiar and non-threatening as possible in order to succeed. So it practically pleads with the audience that it’s not going to pull any twist dark endings on them.

Online

The movie’s official website opens up with The Trailer playing with photos from the movie framing that player.

“The Story” gives an overview of the movie’s plot and make a big deal of promoting that the film comes from “the people” behind some other cute semi-independent movies that have come out in recent years. More on that later.

There’s a section for “The Soundtrack” as well as a link to where it can be downloaded in iTunes, though since I don’t recognize any of the artists there I can’t say the emphasis is because they have a collection of hot singers.

Finally, “The Gallery” has about 16 stills from the movie.

The movie’s Facebook page has updates on new clips and other marketing materials being released and other news, including some photos from red carpets and. There’s a big emphasis here on the relationship people have with their friends, up to and including a “Baby Maker” app that lets you combine the faces of you and someone else to see what kind of baby you’d create.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

There were a number of TV spots that were primarily focused on showing off the verbal sparring between the two stars. Some focused on the pregnancy and some focused on the relationship between the two characters.

Online ads largely took the form, based on my exposure, of video units that played some film clips in one section while another recreated the poster art.

Media and Publicity

Not much in this area. Aniston and Bateman did some press tours and interviews, but there weren’t really any big stories that broke through into real buzz generators. As is usual with Bateman films, some of the press talk turned to the eventuality of an “Arrested Development” movie, with Aniston even getting in on the fun by saying she’d love to appear in that movie if or when it happens.

Overall

OK, so the marketing may have taken a few liberties and engaged in some hyperbole about the pedigree of its filmmaking team, but that’s not that huge a deal to anyone outside of Hollywood insiders.

Other than that it’s an alright campaign but nothing that is going to knock anyone’s socks off. The movie is kind of being discarded as chaff by Miramax, the result of it going through a protracted acquisition game. But the marketing is still funny enough and despite some obvious slacking (I’m looking at you, website) it makes a half-hearted but effort to reach the audience that finds the two stars charming and engaging, presenting a movie that is absolutely safe as an entertainment option to middle America.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

• 08/23/10 – Aris makes a compelling argument that the movie might have been more successful at the box-office if it had appealed more directly to men, especially in the publicity and press components.
• 08/24/10 – Part of the post-mortem includes speculation that Disney – which agreed to distribute the movie even though it was picked up by Miramax, which is now in limbo – may have skimped out on the marketing push. I don’t know if I buy that – I saw plenty of advertising for it – and it may be, as the article then goes on to speculate, that Aniston herself just couldn’t guarantee a big opening despite what amounted to a full effort on her part.

Kline-tastic

For whatever reason the universe has thrown a number of Kevin Kline movies my way, which has coincidentally happened around the same time a new movie from the actor, The Extra Man, is hitting theaters. Chaplin (in which he plays Douglas Fairbanks), A Fish Called Wanda, Soapdish and Fierce Creatures (not only does the main cast from Wanda reunite here but one of the zoo administrators is played by the same woman who plays John Cleese’s wife in Wanda) and Dave have all been watched recently. The only one I watched purposely was Wanda while the others have all been popping up on cable or Hulu in the last couple months.

The actor is just fantastic and it makes me wish he would get more work in higher-profile movies in the near future. He’s been in a number of films but watching all of these in such close succession makes me appreciate what a real talent he is.

Getting social

I’ve been going through a social media identity crisis recently, something that’s coincided with being extremely busy at work recently. So my posting to Twitter has been down, I barely pay any attention to Facebook and I haven’t been that enthused about “checking in” on Foursquare or anywhere else.

My problems with the location check in services have been particularly acute. I’m very selective about who I approve as a friend on Foursquare but then go ahead and publish all those updates to Twitter, exposing them to a much broader audience. I could go ahead and just check in on Foursquare but what’s the point of that since I’m guessing most people don’t check the site/app but instead rely on seeing their friend’s check ins on Twitter and elsewhere.

I also tried for a while to check in to what I was listening, but honestly that got tiresome after less than a day and it’s not all that interesting since my musical tastes aren’t exactly hip.

So here’s what I’m going to try doing:

In addition to getting back to engaging in more conversations on Twitter I’m going to go back to posting links to my new MMM columns on the MMM Facebook Fan Page or whatever it’s being called now. All of my Twitter updates will also be posted to my personal Facebook page.

I’m going to go back to checking in on Foursquare, but only when I’m not with my family. Doing that seems awfully weird and is an invasion of our privacy. So if you think I don’t go anywhere unless I’m in Sunnyvale, CA or Winter Haven, FL…well…you’re kind of right but not exactly. Those updates will then be cross-posted to Twitter.

Yeah, this is pretty heavy navel-gazing here but wanted to get my thoughts down.

Movie Marketing Madness: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

I’m guessing that many guys in the audience – and even some of the girls – have in their past a person who they wanted to date but who was completely uninterested in them, someone who they thought was absolutely right for them but who remained unconvinced as to the utter rightness of this plan. Or perhaps it was someone who you were interested in but who made you jump through a series of hoops in order to win her heart. Or perhaps it was someone who still seemed to have some sort of weird connection to one or more of their exes, connections that were constantly getting in the way of the relationship you were working on building.

The latter forms the rough idea behind Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. An adaptation of a series of comics published by Oni Press, the movie takes stories from these books and puts them in to a single film. Those stories follow the titular Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a hipster slacker who plays in a band (thereby hitting most all the stereotypes for such a character), as he tries to win the heart of one Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a comely lass who delivers items for Amazon.com. But the path to Ramona’s heart runs squarely through her seven exes whom hold her romantic future in their hands. So in order to be free and clear to be with her he must defeat them in battle.

If that sounds more like the plot to a video game you’re not far off. The Scott Pilgrim books and now the movie are heavily influenced by video games, especially the early Nintendo games that introduced storylines in to the game play. Each ex becomes increasingly hard to defeat until at last Scott encounters “The Boss,” or the most difficult foe to vanquish. With its genre-bending nature it’s only fitting that the movie has been directed by Edgar Wright, director of such recent classics as Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Wright knows how to bring disparate genres into accord with one another and create a finished product that appeals to obsessive geeks, making him a perfect fit for this material.

So all that being said let’s take a look at the campaign.

The Posters

The first bit of official marketing material for the movie outside of the occasionally photo release was a teaser poster that debuted at ShoWest 2010 and went public shortly after that. The poster was pretty simple and just showed Cera as Pilgrim wielding his guitar, head bowed down to the ground in an outpouring of musical emotion. With the title treatment pouring out of the guitar like smoke and the copy “An Epic of Epic Epicness” this is a fun poster that conveys a playful attitude for the film and it works. It’s also reportedly a decent recreation of one of the first panels of the source comic so it has that geek factor going for it as well.

Later on a series of seven character posters were released, each of which featured one of the evil ex-boyfriends Pilgrim must defeat on the road to winning Ramona’s heart. The UGO feature where these posters were released also had a brief bit of background on who that guy was and and what kind of relationship they had with Ramona.

Surprisingly there does not seem to have been a final theatrical poster created and released, something that would have summed up what had come before.

The Trailers

The first trailer quickly shows Scott catching his first glimpse of Ramona, which has him instantly smitten. We then get shots of them having a warm and loving relationship before he’s clobbered and the premise that he has to defeat all those ex-boyfriends in order to date her is introduced. The trailer wasn’t so much about laying out extensive plot elements as it was about introducing the audience to the visual look and feel of the movie with its crazy special effects and video game aesthetics.

The second trailer (released only after Wright engaged in a little campaigning, mainly on Twitter, to get the “Likes” on the movie’s official Facebook page to 100,000) doesn’t add a whole lot to the audience’s understanding of the plot but does have a bunch of additional cool visuals. We get more shots of Scott and Ramona meeting at the party and it’s clear this isn’t love at first sight for both of them. Only after he orders something from Amazon, where she works as a delivery person, does she agree to go out with him. But from then on out it’s one battle after another as the evil ex-boyfriends come after Scott and again we get a few additional scenes from their clashes. It’s still fun – especially as you look around the screen and see all the little onomatopoeia and graphics that pop out randomly such as “dong” when the doorbell rings and the video-game power-up graphic that shows up when Scott says he’s going to “get a life.” Those are very cool touches and make the trailer worthy of repeat viewings.

Close to release an interactive version of the second trailer was released that allowed people to click anywhere withing the video at any time and access information about the movie or the specific scene, featurettes or other deeper info about the movie. Pretty cool but mostly only for those that are deeply interested in the movie and the world Wright has created.

Online

You certainly can’t say that the opening of the official website for the movie is subtle. With video, crazy graphics and more the splash page is quite the eye-catcher.

In the left-hand column is the same key art that’s seen in the teaser poster the most static thing on the page. In the middle is a mini-menu of items that starts with “Watch Videos,” which opens up a video player that lets you check out the trailers, the game trailer, TV spots, clips and featurettes. Then there’s more video under “Remixes,” which takes you to a stand-alone YouTube channel that mashes up various clips from the movie with some funky beats.

“Socialrama” is basically a landing page for the movie’s social profiles, including Wright’s Twitter stream, a Facebook social page badge and more. “Free Ringtones” has exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to find under that section.

Moving to the right-hand column you’ll find first the “Mega Avatar Creator,” which lets you create your own avatar in the style of the original comic book art. When this feature first debuted about half my Twitter followers created theres and it became difficult to see who was who.

The i-Trailer we discussed previously is next, followed by a prompt to download the “Pilgrim’s Punch-Out” iPhone/iPad game/app. After that is an add to get the Beck tune “Summertime” by pre-ordering the movie’s soundtrack. Finally there’s a link to find out more about the source comic from Oni Press.

And that’s all before you “Enter the Site.”

Over on the right there’s a wheel of the relationships in Scott’s life. So mousing over one of the headshots of the people there shows you who they’re dating, who they’re related to and such.

The first section in the main site is “The Story,” which lays out what the movie is about and what the conflicts are going to be.

Next is “People” where you can read biographies and career overviews of the cast and the crew, overviews that are far better written than some I’ve seen.

“Pics” has about 30 stills from the movie, including a handful of behind-the-scenes shots with Wright. “Downloads has all kinds of stuff, from the usual Wallpapers and Buddy Icons to Twitter backgrounds and even CubeCraft downloads that let you create little paper figures of the characters in the movie. The same videos that were on the front page are in the “Videos” section here.

“Notes” is a downloadable PDF of production notes. What’s fun is that instead of the usual “Click to Resume” that sites show when something else is going on this site has “Insert Coin to Continue,” which fits with the video game ideas behind the movie.

Also carried over from the front page are the “Avatar Creator,” “Socialrama” and the “iTrailer.” But there’s also a “VideoBlog” that features a handful of behind-the-scenes videos from the film’s production and which are a sub-set of a larger blog on the movie’s making.

The movie’s official Twitter feed has updates a plenty on the release of new marketing materials, new publicity events with the cast and crew and other information that’s designed to get people excited about the film. Likewise with the Facebook page, which not only has similar updates and conversation on the Wall but also plenty of photos and videos as well as links to the Avatar Creator and other features from the full website. And you’ll find most of the videos that are on the official site also on the movie’s YouTube page.

In addition to those official studio-run outlets the blog and Twitter profile of Wright became pretty influential outlets for information about the movie and updates on what either had been released or was about to be released. As we’ve seen with other directors such as Kevin Smith and Jason Reitman, the ability of the director to get personally involved in the conversation has only increased the desire of the audience to see the movie and led to a lot of goodwill towards the movie among those he’s been interacting with.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

In early June the TV advertising campaign kicked off with the release of the first two spots. For the most part both of them followed the basic outline of the second trailer – we see Ramona deliver the Amazon package and then explain the conflicts Scott is about to face – but the first one diverges at the end and adds some new material, namely the showdown between Scott and the girl Ramona went through a bi-curious phase with, a girl who now according to her is a little bi-furious. Which is such a good line.

Further TV spots would similarly focus on something specific from the movie, presenting paired down versions of the trailer with maybe one or two new scenes that hadn’t been seen before.

A featurette on the movie that was largely clips from the trailers with brief interviews with the cast interspersed ran on in-theater ad networks in order to introduce the movie to other audiences.

A very literal adaptation – sort of akin to the motion comics that are being produced for various titles – of two scenes from the books that didn’t wind up in the movie was created as an animated special airing on Cartoon Network. Based on the trailer for that special it features the voices of the movie’s cast, at least for those characters who are in both things.

A massive amount of online advertising was done, most of which featured the teaser poster art of Cera and his guitar. Banners, towers and block ads were run as well as a few full video units that had the trailer or at least segments of it.

There only appear to be two promotional partners on board here. One is shoe company Adidas, though that company’s website doesn’t seem to have any efforts that are being highlighted to it’s hard to know what the specifics are.

The other partner is the Toronto Convention and Visitors Association. That’s not surprising considering the story is set there and Cera himself is from north of the border. The Toronto CVA site has lots of good stuff, including an audio interview with Cera, fan-submitted photos from Oni’s Comic-Con party and other related events and, of course, information on visiting Toronto.

Media and Publicity

Everyone loved it when the first official images from the movie were released by Wright. Lacking any other official material, these constituted the first real glimpses of the movie and how the characters were being translated to film that the audience, which was quite literally salivating over the release of such images, got.

One of the first long-form clips from the movie (outside the trailers, obviously) came during the 2010 MTV Movie Awards and showed Pilgrim going up against the action movie star ex-boyfriend played by Chris Evans. Except things get more complicated when Scott realizes he doesn’t just have to fight him but also his cadre of stunt doubles.

The select few who attended the Los Angeles Film Festival got to see another extended look at the movie – nine minutes worth of footage – accompanied by a Q&A with director Wright that was conducted by another big name director, J.J. Abrams.

Cera and Wright sat down for what was supposed to be an interview by the former of the latter but which quickly digressed into a banter session (Wired, 6/22/10) where they discussed Comic-Con, socks and whatever else crossed their minds.

Of course the movie’s comics pedigree and embracing of the source book’s myriad gaming references meant it was going to be primed for a big explosion (LAT, 7/15/10) at Comic-Con 2010. That big explosion entailed panel discussions, outdoor advertising and promotions and a big “Scott Pilgrim Experience” event that brought attendees into the movie’s world. A bunch of clips were also released right around the time of Comic-Con to take advantage of the general positive buzz that was being generated there by showing people extended scenes from the movie. There was even a special badge created by Gowalla that people could earn by attending events at the convention and a stand-alone Twitter feed just for the movie’s activities there.

Culkin even got the occasional spotlight such as this story (New York Times, 8/2/10) where he talks about his love of classic video games and otherwise establishes his hipster credentials.

Also benefiting from the increased press awareness was Oni Comics, the publisher of the source book and which actually set up a production company of its own (LAT, 8/5/10) in order help some of the titles it published make the transition to the screen.

Believe me when I say, though, that what I’ve included above is nowhere near being representative of the amount of buzz this movie has. These are just some of the highlights of the concerted and coordinated press effort. If I were to include everything that had been written about Scott Pilgrim in the last year or so this column would be somewhere around 78 pages long.

Overall

It’s really hard to argue with anything about this campaign. Not only is it fun, presenting a bright and interesting movie that seems to positively crackle with its own unique energy but the entire campaign has been designed to appeal as strongly as possible to an audience of obsessive pop culture junkies, the kind of people who immediately recognized little “1UP” graphics and who are going to find visualized sound effects on screen in the same manner they are in comics really, really funny.

Many movies that have such strong word-of-mouth elements tend to skimp on the actual marketing, apparently under the theory that spending money on formal marketing efforts is just a waste of money with so much positive buzz almost assured. This campaign suffers from a slight case of that – no final poster and just two trailers – but in this instance it makes sense. With a likable star, a director that is completely invested in helping to promote things through his Twitter account and a cast and crew in general that’s willing to shill the movie in any conceivable way, the need for lots of marketing collateral disappears to an extent.

What there is of the actual campaign, though, works just as strongly as the geek appeal portion has. The poster is kind of awesome and the trailers certainly present the movie as a fun and unique way to spend a Friday night. All that then comes together along with the other components of the campaign on a website that is more full-featured than most any of the other sites I’ve looked at recently and which showcases most of the other elements of this campaign.

A very good effort for a movie I’m excited about seeing.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

• 8/12/10 – Cinematical has a fan-made video that takes the audio from the trailer and imposes it over scenes from the graphic novel.

Movie Marketing Madness: Flipped

We all remember the first person of the opposite sex that started us thinking that girls did not, in fact, have cooties or that boys, despite conventional wisdom, were all gross. Suddenly overnight someone in particular – maybe the girl the other guys have been teasing you about during recess because you sit next to her in class – appears in a different light. I’m not talking about physical development, which is sure to catch the eye, but about the natural sense that maybe she’s nice and you’d like to play with her more. Most all of us have probably had that moment and carry around the memory of that person in a very special place in our minds – even if the memories are tinged with embarrassment – regardless of what the rest of our lives have brought us.

Tapping in to that feeling is Flipped, the new movie from director Rob Reiner. Set in the 1960′s The story of Flipped follows Bryce, a young boy who’s moving in to a new neighborhood and in to a house right across the street from Juli, who is immediately smitten. He, though, wants nothing to do with girls in general much less Juli, who he only sees as embarrassing him. Through the next six years this dynamic continues until, just as Juli is set to give up on him, Bryce begins to see the light. Hence the title.

Reiner has lost some of his sure-fire edge in the last decade, but it shouldn’t be forgotten just how hard he was swinging the bat in the 80′s and much of the 90′s. Out of the the 14 movies he’s directed since 1984′s This is Spinal Tap only three or four are less than solid triples and only one is a complete strikout. Before 2000 he was batting about .800. And this sort of movie, with its heavy reliance on sentimentality, should be like a curveball that hangs about belt high for him.

No, I haven’t been watching a lot of baseball recently. Why?

The Posters

The movie’s poster is all about creating a feeling of idyllic nostalgia. The two kids sit on a tree branch looking out over a picturesque sunset behind a rural setting. Everything is perfectly in place and everything is perfect, just the way it is in the rust of that first pre-teen love. That’s accentuated by the copy above the title, which states “You never forget your first love.” This design is actually perfectly appropriate for that line since this sort of idealized version of what that’s like is exactly how we *do* remember our first love as being all soft-tones and rounded edges and not messy at all.

The poster wisely sticks with The Bucket List, Stand By Me (another look back in nostalgia) and When Harry Met Sally as Reiner’s list of ccomplishment. It trades off those movies without naming Reiner specifically, presumably because he’s lost some name recognition whereas those movies have not.

The Trailers

The first trailer does a great deal of expository setup, letting the audience know what’s going to be going on with the main characters. We meet our protagonist, a young man who’s moving into a new neighborhood in the 1950s and who immediately is eyed by a nice young girl his own age on the same street.

Through the awkward years in grade school into middle school these two grow up around each other until eventually his hormones kick in and, somewhere in the junior high years, he starts to notice her as much as she’s always noticed him. So the trailer shows clearly this is about growing up and the first rush of childhood love. That, coupled with the fact that it’s coming from director Reiner lets the audience know more or less what they’re in for here.

Online

The movie’s official website opens with the trailer playing automatically so it’s alright to sit and rewatch it.

“About the Film” just has a synopsis of the movie’s story that treads the same ground as the trailer without too much more context or information.

The “Video” section starts off with the Trailer but you’ll also find two TV Spots there.

“Have you Flipped?” is a little 10 question quiz that is designed to see if you have a crush on someone or not. And the “Unforgettable Love” section lets you carve your initials into a tree with a little heart around them, an image you can then share with your Twitter or Facebook friends.

Unfortunately that’s it. There’s no cast or crew information, no downloads or anything else.

The Facebook page for the movie has updates on advertising, promotions and publicity as well as the usual videos and photos and such. Based on the Wall comments there’s a built in audience for the movie of people who have read and enjoyed the source novel

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Two or three TV spots have been created for the movie. All feature footage that’s been seen in the trailer and make it clear the film is about true love back in the idyllic 1960s. They also all play up the history Reiner has with making crowd-pleasing movies that have staying power with audiences, especially invoking Stand By Me since it’s the most thematically similar entry in his oeuvre.

I haven’t seen any other advertising and am not aware of any cross-promotions or other outside marketing help.

Media and Publicity

Following the release of the first batch of marketing materials the press coverage of the movie focused on how it was a return to form of a sort (Los Angeles Times, 7/5/10) for Reiner to his glory days of the 1980′s, when he had an incredible string of not only commercially but artistically successful movies. Not that most of Reiner’s movies are high-art, but they are well made and enjoyable.

The unconventional campaign run by Warner Bros. for the movie, a campaign that included word-of-mouth screenings in the Midwest and endorsements from groups such as the Parents Television Council, was designed to be very much outside the mainstream and appeal to audiences ranging from pre-teens to senior citizens (LAT, 8/5/10). Running such a campaign was more than a little unusual for a studio that has publicly declared to be relying on event movies and, as the story points out, it seems more than a little odd – though welcome – that the movie got made in the first place.

Overall

While I’m disappointed by the website – it’s stark even by recent studio offering standards, likely because efforts were better put elsewhere – I really like the trailer, poster and TV spots for the movie and feel like they sell the movie very effectively. The nostalgia factor is turned up to 11, obviously, and Reiner being in the director’s chair means you more or less know what you’re getting. But those are all good things. We need more sweet, gentle stories in today’s world. So people like me who are clamoring for such things are being sold a movie that delivers, meaning it should hopefully find some level of success.

Movie Marketing Madness: The Middle Men

I don’t think I can write a better intro than this and since there’s no decent video of the original cast I’m going with the WoW machima version.

Or how about one of Doctor Cox’s comments in this clip.

Set in the distant past of 1995 and telling the story – if in somewhat dramatized form – of how porn started to be big business on the internet is The Middle Men. Luke Wilson takes a break from AT&T commercials to star as the guy with a head for actual business who took the ideas cooked up by two porn-hungry slackers (Giovanni Ribisi and Gabriel Macht) and turned it into something that actually made money. But not everything is as easy as collecting those credit card numbers as the trio encounter mobsters who want in on their territory and senators looking to shut down their filth, not to mention the potential domestic squabbles that are likely to come up when Wilson’s wife finds out what he’s doing.

The Posters

Slightly reminiscent of a Bond movie poster, the primary element is a silouhette of a woman’s body. Within that framework are shots that show off many of the movie’s main characters, from Wilson to Ribisi to Kelsey Grammar. There are also plenty of shots of the beautiful women that will populate the movie since this is a movie about selling sex. So it makes sense to sell it with sex as well.

The poster also does yeoman’s work in terms of plot explanation. There’s a very large bit of copy above the title that takes the audience back in time to 1995, an era of cultural norms that have now passed us by, including the fact that there wasn’t an internet to speak of much less an internet full of porn. That point is reiterated below the title with additional copy labeling the movie as being inspired by the true story of the guys who first “Brought XXX to the www” which is a nice tagline.

The Trailers

The trailer starts out with the same sort of time-period setting exposition from Wilson that is provided on the poster. But then we see how two guys got the idea of putting pictures of naked women on the nascent internet, an idea that truly blossomed when they meet Wilson’s character, who posits the notion of taking credit card payments over the web. This leads to a nice montage showing how successful the combination of porn and commerce winds up making this ragtag group.

That success comes with temptations and problems, the latter in the form of James Caan and his group of heavies. Later on we see Kevin Pollack warning him to get out and finally Wilson is in the office of a state official played by Grammar, who’s about to lay the hammer down until he’s confronted with his own billing record.

It’s a loose and funny trailer that lays out the movie pretty well and certainly plays up the notion that the internet porn which is now so commonplace was founded on the work of three guys, two of which could barely put a full sentence together.

A later red-band trailer covered the same ground story wise but included a lot more female nudity and swearing, selling the movie as a soft-core porn in its own right as well as a historical document of how all that internet porn got started.

Online

The movie’s official website starts off by playing the all-ages trailer alongside a recreation of the poster art. Above the video player there’s an invitation to watch the “Uncensored Trailer” as well.

Under “About the Film” the first bit of information is a Synopsis that reads a lot like the trailer in that it starts out with setting the technological scene that was 1995. Also there are Cast and Crew biographies that, while not massively long, are good enough and which outstrip by a long shot what have been featured on other movie sites this summer.

“Videos” has both of the trailers as well as three “Clips” that actually appear to be TV spots.

The “Galleries” are stocked with quite a few photos ranging from production stills candids from the movie’s parties during the Cannes Film Festival.

Finally “News” is divided into two sections, Online and Print. The first contains links to various write-ups about the movie, ranging from reviews to blog posts about the red-band trailer or other marketing material. The latter has scans – which unfortunately can’t be enlarged, of some of the press coverage the film has received. There aren’t links to those stories, which is also unfortunate.

The movie’s Facebook page and Twitter feed are well stocked with updates as to the promotional and marketing activities for the film, including the release of new clips and other material. There are also links to early reviews of the movie. There’s a halfway decent amount of conversation on Twitter, which is nice to see from the studio.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

As mentioned above there were some TV spots created for the movie. The spots carry the same basic frame as the trailer (back in the dark ages of 1995 there wasn’t a bevy of porn on the then-burgeoning web) but carry distinctive tones. They seem a bit lighter than the trailer even though there are still scenes of the characters being in danger, but perhaps because they’re briefer those scenes don’t really interfere with the overall sense of craziness that’s created.

There may have been some online advertising done but if there was I haven’t come across it. The only news that I’ve seen about online efforts is a story saying the film’s producer – not Paramount Vantage – placed some pre-roll spots on a video porn site. Can’t say that’s not contextual.

Media and Publicity

The movie’s appearance at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival laid the groundwork for it to be acquired by Paramount Vantage and also got people talking about the film in general.

Other than that most of the buzz was just about the release of the marketing materials.

Overall

Not a bad campaign and certainly one that’s brand consistent throughout all the individual elements. The poster and website give off the same vibes that are found in the trailers, especially in how all these components are focused on taking us back to the mindset of 1995, a year which pre-dates not only the rampant expansion of the web but also DVDs and other things we now view as solid technology.

It’s a smaller movie but the campaign has a swagger about it that seems like it’s trying to be much bigger than it is. So it’s not content playing to the art house crowd or anything like, instead seemingly hoping to become more of a mainstream hit.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

• 08/05/10: The Los Angeles Times has more to offer on the strategy by the producers – including the real life version of the character Luke Wilson plays – to advertise the movie on porn sites.