The $50 million dollar question, what do all these random websites have in common?
• The homepage of a Japanese soft drink company
• YouTube videos of a destroyed oil rig
• MySpace profiles of half a dozen young New Yorkers
• A Los Angeles bakery
• A tribute site dedicated to a teenage murder victim
They’re all elements of a complex viral marketing campaign for the budget monster movie that generated $50 million on its US release, Cloverfield, the second installment of this month’s Profero movie marketing analysis. The campaign shot the movie into the marketing stratosphere and, like The Dark Knight, continued to raise the benchmark in audience manipulation and engagement. Read on for a summary of the campaign and its route to success at the box office.
Inglourious Basterds
As part of the social media film review we have been looking at new benchmarks for successful marketing campaigns by films exploiting the social media space to engage and disseminate information to potential cinema-goers. Dark Knight threw down the gauntlet to potential adopters of viral marketing strategies and the success of the multi-pronged Cloverfield campaign saw a creative and intelligent teaser campaign that involved moviegoers beyond the conversations at the water cooler. However, neither of these used the social phenomenon Twitter as effectively as Quentin Taratino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Recently we have seen correlations drawn between Twitter activity and box office performances. “Twitter sinks Bruno” articles, for example. However, according to Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog, Inglorious Basterds is the first film that can directly thank Twitter for its opening weekend box office success. A bold statement, indeed, given the proven audience-pulling power of both Pitt and Tarantino.
So, how can we/anyone make the claim that IB has, in fact, tamed the mob that runs the Twitter trending topics thus benefiting hugely from the “Twitter factor”?
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