Media in the Online Age - Film Promotion

The Interview

The Campaign

In June of 2014, 3 months after the film was announced and 6 months before it would finally be released, The Guardian reported that the film was making a stir in the North Korean government.

#ViralKCNA, the state news agency in North Korea, promised that the country would hit back with ‘stern and merciless’ retaliation if the film was released, calling it the ‘most blatant act of terrorism and war’ with all the level-headed calm we’ve come to expect from the country.

In the months that followed, prominent North Korean politicians publicly lambasted the film, and the KCNA asked President Obama if the film could be pulled.

The uncertainty over the films release resulted in missing posters and adverts. Hearing about the interview became mainstream press.

Ex Machina - 2015

The Movie

• The campaign and movie are both centered on the Turing test; whether a human can distinguish a machine from another human.

Trailer

What they did• The Marketing team of Ex

Machina created a Tinder bot of Ava - the humanoid AI from the movie. They used pictures of the actress, Alicia Vikander, and set her up as a 25-year old woman.

• Those that matched with her would be asked a series of deep questions, including Have you ever been in love? and What makes you human?. The men, hopeful to get ‘intimate’, were instead directed to an Instagram profile for the movie.

Reaction

• The campaign received some negative press as it was seen as trickery. However, it’s cheap marketing and drew a lot attention to the movie. This is because most of the men couldn’t spot the fake character, probably due to their ‘blind sight’

Deadpool Viral Marketing Campaign

ASSASSINS CREEDMOVIE

2017

What is it about?

• Based off the Assassins Creed game series, turned into a film with a similar storyline.

• The protagonist, played by Michael Fassbender, is looking into his ancestors past and can go back in time and become his assassin ancestors.

Posters• They used posters to promote Assassins Creed’s release by selling

individual posters and also paying for advertisement space on the side of Stagecoach buses in the UK.

Trailers

• 20th Century Fox released several trailers for Assassin’s Creed.

• Some of them:• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

=mcTtP1JnJ_E• https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=4haJD6W136c

Stunts

• Assassins Creed was given a lot of attention from the press and film critics because one of the iconic features of Assassins Creed is a skyfall jump from over 100 feet.

• In Assassins Creed movie it was filmed for real at 125 feet, it got press coverage for being one of the riskiest stunt jumps in any film.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAEm8gRyqcc

thanks for watching

Sound of My Voice

• Sound of My Voice is a 2011 American psychological thriller directed by Zal Batmanglij and starring Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicius and Brit Marling.

• The plot focuses on two documentary filmmakers who attempt to expose a cult led by a charismatic leader who claims to be from the future.

• Premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Fox Searchlight Pictures on 27th April 2012

• The viral campaign consisted of a website featuring the first 12 minutes of the film as a teaser. From this the video offered links to a variety of viral sites tied to the cult at the center of the film. One of the pages makes mention of regular meetings at LA’s Ukrainian Cultural Center at 4315 Melrose Avenue every Thursday night at 7pm

• Interested fans visited the real location at the set times to find that not only did staged meetings take place, but the actors of the film would appear and play as their characters.

• This happened every Thursday from the first teaser trailer until the release of the movie.

• The movie had a YouTube channel called 4twentyseven2012 (the films release date) which featured videos by the cult inviting fans to visit the previously mentioned meetings.

• https://youtu.be/FRULNCK27bY?t=1m21s

Viral Marketing – The Blair Witch Project

Jack and Morgan

‘Missing’ Posters • During the build-up to the

release of The Blair Witch Project, posters and leaflets were handed in Cannes, Maryland. They showed that three college students had gone missing while filming a documentary in a forest nearby. In relation to this, all three actors were listed as ‘missing presumed dead’ on IMDb leading up to the release in 1999.

Trailers and Website• There was a website created

about the legend of the Blair Witch, including all history and sightings from 1785 onward. They then posted ‘found footage’ from the film itself and depicted it to all be real found footage. There are many photos of the filmmakers both during and before production, and there is an entire page dedicated to each of the three students including diary entries and video diaries during the production.

• During 1999 a lot of snippets of trailers were released as if they were being posted by whoever had kidnapped the students. These trailers were posted on a Sci-Fi network for college students only, this saved money by avoiding the mainstream cinemas and lead the audience to believe they’d stumbled upon something special.

Attention to Detail

• On top of the previous methods they also constantly carried out additional pieces of ‘detective work’ to make it seem all the more realistic. All the families were interviewed about the so-called disappearances, crime scene photos were created, and there was even an alleged autopsy carried out on a body found nearby in order to make out that one of the students may have been found.

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