Chasing Ad Dollar Is All Fun and Games
Entertainment Industry
Leads Drive to Enhance
Interactive Campaigns
By STEPHANIE KANG
August 7, 2007; Page B3WSJ
In the coming film "The Seeker: The Dark is Rising," a teenage boy travels through time, collecting the six different signs that will help him save the world. To market the movie, family-friendly film studio Fox Walden is sending viewers on a hunt for the same signs, hidden in the movie's advertising and marketing.
Fox Walden hid images of the six signs -- colorful talisman-like symbols -- in everything from movie trailers to billboards to the cardboard cutouts displayed in movie theaters.
When users plug in the signs on the movie's Web site in a specific order, they get access to content such as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the movie's cast and crew.
Talisman-like signs from 'The Seeker' are hidden in the movie's marketing materials.
The hunt for symbols in real-life marketing materials "mirrors the story of the movie," says Jeffrey Godsick, president of marketing for Fox Walden. But instead of saving the world, Fox Walden wants to engage consumers, getting them interested in the film months before it hits theaters in October. Between late July and the movie's opening, the studio will insert 25 different combinations of the signs into its marketing, which lead to 25 different pieces of content on the Web site.
Movie studios once used to concentrate their marketing on TV ad campaigns, but as viewers increasingly use digital video recorders to avoid ads, studios -- as with other marketers -- are trying an array of additional marketing techniques.
In recent years, some studios have put resources into buzz marketing, efforts aimed at sparking interest about a movie among demographic groups seen as potential fans. Adding impetus to these moves is pressure on studios to land the biggest audience possible on a film's opening weekend, given movie theaters' tendency nowadays to drop a film if it doesn't fill theaters immediately.
Walden Media, a unit of Philip Anschutz's Anschutz Film Group, which jointly owns Fox Walden with News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox film studio, developed an elaborate grass-roots marketing campaign for one of its last projects, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," released by Walt Disney. As part of that effort, Disney and Walden sent "Narnia" materials to schools, including copies of the C.S. Lewis novel on which the film is based, among other moves. (Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, agreed last week to be purchased by News Corp.)
"The Seeker" is based on "The Dark is Rising," by award-winning children's author Susan Cooper. The novel's plot hinges on the same six symbols as in the movie, and Fox Walden hopes the signs in the ad campaign will appeal to the book's fan base, as well as fantasy-adventure fans generally.
To make consumers aware of the campaign, Mr. Godsick says Fox Walden is talking with Internet movie bloggers and television and print entertainment outlets. Fox Walden is also discussing stunts such as having trucks with billboards of specific signs roaming around a city such as New York for a day, or hanging up a different poster with a sign on six consecutive retail-store windows for a day. Mr. Godsick hopes fans will take pictures of these stunts, talk about them online and spread the word about the movie. The film's director, David L. Cunningham, hid images of the different signs in the movie itself. "It helps create the mood of the film, and it allowed the marketing guys to build on that" in the campaign, Mr. Cunningham says.
The experiential approach to marketing films is more commonplace than ever, says Damon Wolf, a partner at Crew Creative Advertising in Los Angeles, which isn't working on the "Seeker" campaign. "These campaigns build brand equity out of the gate and allow the viewer to be part of the marketing experience," he says. "If it's executed creatively, it has the potential to create a viral frenzy, which is exactly what you want."
Indeed, the recent success of Fox's "The Simpsons Movie" was likely helped by an extensive marketing campaign that included the conversion of almost a dozen 7-Eleven stores to imitate the fictional convenience store featured in the television show.
Consumers also were able to buy products based on those in the show and to convert pictures of themselves into "Simpsons" characters online.
The treasure-hunt element of the "Seeker" marketing campaign is an increasingly popular way of generating interest among diehard fans of a book, movie or other entertainment product.
To promote the third version of its sci-fi videogame "Halo," due in stores late next month, Microsoft is running a series of elaborate treasure hunts. It has arranged for clues to be planted in flyers handed out in different cities, in online comic books or in retail kiosks selling Microsoft Xbox game consoles. Fans who play along discover background stories about characters from the game.
"The goal is to give our existing fans -- a very hardcore, rabid group -- new, exciting information," says Aaron Elliott, online marketing manager at Xbox Global Marketing. "But we also wanted to bring new fans to the franchise without immersing them immediately into the arcane stuff."
While dedicated fans may enjoy the extra material, Mr. Elliott says it was nearly impossible to put out enough content to satisfy truly rabid fans. At the same time, the complicated, tech-heavy hunting could turn off more casual fans.
Mr. Godsick acknowledges the campaign isn't for everyone. "People who like to get engaged in these kinds of games are a more narrow audience, but it's the kind of people who are the most rabid fans. They really dig movies, and they tend to be there Friday night."
