Movie Marketing Watch: Obsessed
Movie Tagline
The movie’s tag line All’s Fair When Love is War effectively plays on the oft-quoted Shakespearan maxim for the purpose of the movie, which is a thriller about a deranged woman obsessed with a married lawyer at a firm starring singer Beyoncé, Ali Larter, and Idris Elba.
Movie’s Web Marketing
Wanting to capitalize on the fact that many of Beyonce’s fans are twenty-somethings and teens, Sony set up a MySpace page for the movie that features a forum where movie fans can start discussion threads about the movie, Beyonce herself.
MySpace Features
There’s also a standard MySpace comments section. The forum doesn’t have too much activity, and most of the posts were actually initiated by Sony International not fans (oh, the trouble with forums). Days before the movie’s release, the page had already garnered 3736 friends.
The Facebook page, where presumably, there’s less phantom identities, the friend count was a little higher with 4,326 fans. The movie’s Facebook wall is put to good use, with periodic annnouncements placed, beginning in late March about the movie, and about the pop star’s musical activities.
Marketing Partnerships
Sony Pictures, the studio behind the movie, chose to team up with Yahoo’s OMG, and create a Celebrity Obsession page, linked in from the Obsessed movie Facebook page, featuring a slideshow of celebrities and their obsessions.
Glam.com, one of the most highly women-perused web portals on the Internet, also has a banner on the Facebook page, which leads to a 15-question quiz for a fan to determine whether she (or he) is obsessed with Beyoncé.
Viral Video
Another site set up by Sony called Get Obsessed with Ali (http://www.getobsessedwithali.com/) gives fans the chance to become the subject of Lisa Sheridan’s (her character in the movie) displaced affections. From there movie fans can send their own viral Ali Larter video to a friend.
Movie Marketing Trends: Trip Contests
Canada-based Mongrel Media, the movie company behind the upcoming Michael McGowan movie starring Joshua Jackson One Week is adopting a similar strategy as the marketers for the Woody Allen Oscar winning movie Vicky Christina Barcelona: they’re sending contestants on a vacation.
Visitors who hop on the movie’s website have a chance to win a two tickets for a trip to the rockies, as well as chance to be one of 10 winners to win customized leather bags from leather goods and active wear company Roots and books and DVDs prize packs.
In orchrestrating the contest, Mongrel is partnering with AirCanada and luxury hotel chain Fairmont.
And they’re not stopping there. Mongrel Media is actually offering free screenings on a first-come-first-served basis to the movie website’s visitors. Movie fans will get a chance to sign themselves and a friend up for the free screening in major Canadian cities like Halifax, Caligary, Ottawa, Vancouver and Edmonton. And they get automatically opted in for other screenings and the company’s movie alerts newsletter.
The Rockies trip contest certainly correlates with the movie’s actual plot which centers on an about-to-be wed twenty-something whose impending marriage propels him to do some soul searching via a border-crossing road trip.
Expect to see more movie contests in this vein as more and more studios join forces with companies in cross-branding efforts such as this one.