Ambient Advertising

Guerrilla, Ambient & Viral Movie Marketing Part 3: The Films of 2007

Click for Part 1 and Part 2

Part 3 features a trio of films from 2007 using some form of Guerrilla, Ambient or Viral techniques. Up until now the films using these techniques have mainly been aimed at adult males. 2007 was the year when kids films and cartoons got in on the action. Kicking off with Aqua Teen Hunger Force – or ‘how not to run a guerrilla marketing campaign’ lesson if ever there was one, followed by Bee Movie and The Simpsons Movie.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2007)

A classic example of how Guerrilla Marketing can go bad! This campaign shut down Boston as the emergency services had to deal with what they thought were 40 bombs placed around the city. The ‘bombs’ were boxes with LED lights in the shape of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force logo and ment to promote the upcoming cinema debut of the cartoon TV show. However, as these boxes mysteriously appeared overnight and placed at visible points around the city, no one realised what they were for. Pretty soon police, fire and bomb disposal experts were on the scene, and of course the news organisations. One of the box’s was even blown up in a controlled explosion. Generating free publicity that can help carry a marketing campaigns message is a major plus. Some organisations such as Ryanair and Paddy Power openly court controversy in order to get the free publicity that can be worth millions to the organisation. However, is all publicity bad publicity? To get a sense of what was happening in Boston check this clip, the news report starts at 19 seconds

So your product is the centre of a massive bomb scare that shuts down Boston, your product is all over the news channels, the city spends countless dollars on making the 40 objects safe. It’s crisis management time, in a crisis you send out your most senior member of the team, one who can handle the media and can project the right tone to calm the sense of outrage and hysteria over the situation.

Aqua Teen sent out two people to talk about the history of contemporary hairstyles…

Rating… They might have been advised not to talk about the case but come on! At least show a little remorse for the hassle caused to the emergency teams of Boston, the money wasted on the clean up operation, the grief and stress caused to those caught up in the vicinity of the 40 devices. I have to give this a big fat zero for three reasons. First it was ill conceived with no evaluation of the after effects or an emergency plan for worst case scenario, second it showed a complete lack of responsibility to society and third the attitude of the guys behind it was just the icing on the cake. Marketing has to have some sort of responsibility and social awareness or else what kind of world would we be in? Overall 0/10 …. But as a lesson in how not to run a guerrilla campaign 10/10

As an aside, and fitting in with my copy / re-engineer / add something new theory, PS3 copied, reengineered and added something new to this in Dublin last year, what was added, or more precisely learned in this case, was not to close down the city.

Bee Movie

I thought I’d include this oddity because of what it is. Jerry Seinfeld is promoting the living daylights out of his animated flick Bee Movie and, well, let me hand over to NyMag.com

“It’s hard to say which of the movie’s marketing techniques has been the most effective: The trailers? The TV spots? The billboards? The magazine ads? The newspaper ads? The magazine and Website interviews? The appearances on talk shows, including an hour on Oprah during which the host wore a bee headband the entire time? The front-page “Arts & Leisure” profile of Jerry Seinfeld? The event at Cannes where Seinfeld dressed as a bee? The Brach’s candy corn “made with real honey”? The McDonald’s Happy Meals? The bee-painted Volkswagen Beetles at the L.A. premiere? The music video with 100 kids dressed as bees? The short mini-mockumentaries on NBC? The Hewlett-Packard ads that manage to contain not one but two mentions of Bee Movie? His guest-starring role on 30 Rock, during which, at one point, he actually looked right at the camera and plugged the movie?”

So you get the idea Jerry will pretty much do anything to promote the film. That extract doesn’t even go half as far to explain what Seinfeld did in Cannes. Watch this clip.

Source

Rating… That was both weird and pointless1/10

The Simposons Movie

To promote the Simpsons film in 2007, twelve 7-11 convenience stores were converted into Kiwk-E-Marts. The stores also sold products featured in the show such as Squishee’s, pink frosted doughnuts and Krusty O cereal. The cross promotion certainly helped the 7-11 stores where sales increased by significantly as customers increased by 50%. The chain also estimated they received $7 million in free publicity from the promotion. The chains website on average receives 40,000 hits perday, but at the peak of the month long promotion the site received over 10 million hits.

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Source (and lots more pics)

The Kwik E Mart’s even came with graffiti

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Hopefully Part 4 in the series will arrive in the next week (time commitments!), but it’ll look at 2008 and especially the Dark Knight.

Related posts:

1. Guerrilla, Ambient & Viral Movie Marketing Pt 2: 2001 – 2006
2. Guerrilla PS3 Stunt Dublin [video]
3. Guerrilla, Ambient and Viral Movie Marketing (4): Cloverfield ‘V’ The Dark Knight
4. Guerrilla, Ambient & Viral Movie Marketing Pt 1: Blair Witch Project
5. 6 Guerrilla Marketing Mistakes

© 2010 LAB: Luke Abbotts Blog.