The Cloverfield monster is … made of marketing!
(For full effect, say that title aloud in your best Charlton Heston / Soylent Green voice of pathos and outrage.)
Myself, I don’t watch horror movies — I’ve always been too squeamish. But even I am intrigued by the marketing surrounding the upcoming monster-attacks-New-York movie Cloverfield, which is the brainchild of Lost and Alias creator J. J. Abrams.
The multifaceted marketing campaign for the movie has included standard fare like thrilling trailers, but it has also broken new ground by using social media methods to create an entire mythology around the movie’s characters.
Now Chris Thilk of Movie Marketing Madness has posted an insightful and highly detailed (= long) piece tracing how the marketing campaign has unfolded. If you’re interested in cutting-edge online marketing, it’s well worth your time.
The Tale of Two Cloverfield Campaigns
. . . The two-pronged campaign certainly was a great decision by Abrams and the studio. I don’t think, even if things had kicked off as they did with that initial trailer, that potential fans online would have been as engaged and enthused if there had just been a poster, trailer and Website just like every other movie out there, no matter how cool the movie looked. It would have been subject to the same level of “insider†reports and spy leaks as every other movie.
But by, essentially, giving the online audience a regular supply of new rawhides to chew on Abrams and Paramount were able to earn their loyalty and turn them from casual or even devoted fans into surrogate marketing agents. The bloggers who write about movies in general or this movie in particular were the ones selling the movie, broadcasting the new material that was given to them all over the Internet.
Some friends of mine who are movie buffs say they’ve heard bad things about the film itself — i.e. that the payoff when you’re sitting in the theater isn’t going to be as good as the marketing campaign has been. But I’ll bet that Cloverfield rakes in the money when it debuts tomorrow.
While I’m at it, let me mention this great video of a talk by Abrams at the TED conference. In it, he talks about how he’s been motivated as a storyteller by the “mystery box” — the conundrums that keep you engaged with a story as it unfolds. It’s worth your time if you do any sort of creative work that must intrigue an audience.
Abrams certainly seems to have succeeded in making Cloverfield a series of “mystery boxes.”
(Hat tip to Geoff Livingston for putting me onto Thilk’s post.)
Category: Entertainment, Marketing & Sales5 Comments so far
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Hi Tim,
Thanks for mentioning the column. As you can probably tell I put a lot of work in it and am happy to see it spread around a bit.
–Chris
Movie marketers face an interesting dilemma. Their work must be compelling enough to drive people to the film. Yet if it’s _too_ compelling, there’s a market backlash of ‘the hype was better than the film’.
It can happen in marketing any product but is more obvious in entertainment. In my mind that underscores that a quality product is an essential part of the marketing mix.
Chris — You’re quite welcome. Good stuff, sir.
Russ — Quality product = amen. Your comment also gets me thinking about the degree to which entertainment is ALL marketing. Even the product itself (”content”, story, whatever we want to call it in the abstract) is itself a sort of advertisement for itself. There’s a recursive loop there, I think.
Wait, I’m stepping over into literary-theory-land … I’ll just stop now.
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