Blog 7: Breaking the Fourth Wall - Part 2

Hello people,

How are you doing? I hope everything is good with you. I am thinking about continue to the part two of the “Breaking the Forth Wall”, and that is exactly what I will do. In case you did not read my last post, in the movie industry, the expression “breaking the forth wall” is used when a character in the movie starts talking to the audience, basically when he admits he is in the movie. However this is an expression that can be used for any time a movie stop being just frames on a screen and become part of our lives, basically when a movie get out of the screen and you somehow, someway, end up being a part of the movie in the real life. In the last few years, this has been used to promote movies, as a shown on my last post the Dead Man Down prank was made so that people could feel like they were witnessing a murder, so that we viewers of the prank could see these people’s reaction to that. This situation being a part of the movie, made a movie situation be a part of people lives, this is break the fourth wall. This was a great marketing campaign having more than 7million views. In today’s post I will talk about two other pranks made it to promote movies, both made for horror movies, so get ready, things are going to get a little bit scary…or funny, depend on how you look at it. Let’s go!

This is the first prank with more than 2 million views on YouTube:

This was a prank made to promote the movie Ouija, a horror movie that premiered in 2014; therefore it is a really recent movie. This is a great market action, because people will remember this pranks whenever they watch a trailer or see a poster for this movie, making them curious about going to the movie theater and actually watching the movie itself.

The Ouija prank has only 3 million views, the next one went viral, you probably watched it already, and your friends probably did it too.

This prank made to promote the remake of the movie Carrie which premiered in 2013, was all over the Internet, it has over 61 million views, and yes you read this correctly, 61 million views. The movie made $84790678, proving that this marketing campaign was really successful, this is a movie based on a novel written by Stephen King, however during the time of the marketing for this movie, the only thing me and my friends talked about was this commercial, the prank and how awesome was it, basically we went to watch this movie in the theater because of this ad. It definitely affected my purchase decision process, along with a great amount of people that went to watch this movie, because of this great marketing campaign.

So, that is it for today. I hope you guys enjoyed this post. Feel free to comment anything you want. Thanks for reading my blog, and see you on the next post.

Take care,

Leo.

Reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ncQN_7I7hk&index=3&list=WL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlOxlSOr3_M

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=carrie2013.htm

Blog 6: Breaking the Fourth Wall - Part 1

Hi folks,

I am back with another post. Well, this will be divided in two posts too, because it is a long topic, and you guys know me, I do not like long post, because you will probably get bored reading a Brazilian guy talk about marketing in the movie industry, so two posts it is.

In these two posts I want to talk about the ways a movie or a TV show can break what we call in the movie industry: “The Forth Wall”. Which means, when a movie stop being only an entertainment and become part of your real life, when it become not only a bunch of frames on a screen, but they become real things in your day.

The first example happened in the TV Show Breaking Bad, you guys know me; I am a huge fan of this TV Show. In Breaking Bad, Walter White, the main character had lung cancer, but he and his family did not have the money to pay for his treatment. Therefore, his son decided to create a website talking about his father and the situation that they were going through, and on this website he asked for donations to help with his father treatment. Guess what?

Front Page of the website.

Yes, the production of the show made a real website, that look exactly the same as the one on the TV Show (Link to the website:http://www.savewalterwhite.com/). This is such a great idea, it is a really awesome way to make your public believe that those characters can actually exist, especially in Breaking Bad, which is a show that are praised by the reality and the development of their characters, this was a nice touch to engage the audience, breaking the fourth wall. A very important detail, the website have the donation button, and people could actually donate, all the donation collected went to the National Cancer Coalition, they managed to get over $125000 in donations.

Walter White's son using the website during the show.

My second, and last example on this post, is this video made to promote a movie called Dead Man Down.

This is such a great way to talk about the movie. This prank show the reaction of people about a situation that happen in the movie, so they break the forth wall by putting real people in a situation that happen in the movie, to see their behavior when facing this problem. This is a really good way to market the movie, really different than a regular trailer or a normal TV commercial. The video has now more than 7 million views on YouTube, showing that people really like this kind of promotion, I do not know if the movie was a success, but for sure people will remember about this ad made to promote the movie. This is a really good way to influence people in the purchase process, because eventually they will remember this ad and be curious to go and actually watch the movie.

I hope you guys enjoyed this post. Feel free to comment about any doubts or suggestions. Hope to see you guys in the next post.

Take care,

Leo.

Reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo6Jzh7SHRA

http://www.ew.com/article/2013/08/23/breaking-bad-save-walter-white-national-cancer-coalition

http://tec-cia.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Save-Walter-White-e1347331777600.png

https://ninabrowndesign.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/save-walter-white.jpg

http://www.savewalterwhite.com/

Blog 5: Products in Movies

Hello people,

How is everything going? I hope you are doing well. You guys probably already know that I loved movies, that is why one my main goals with this blog is to talk about marketing related to movies, not only how movies advertise themselves, but how people advertise inside a movie. This post is about this last one, how you can advertise inside a movie or a TV show. Well, the easiest way possible is to put a character using some kind of a product, let’s say Marty Mcfly is putting his Nike Air MAGs with self-tying properties (called Power Lace System) and the camera focus on his feet showing clearly Nike’s name and logo, and then the movie goes on. You can just be thinking that this is normal is just a little thing in a movie, but it is not. This is an advertisement made by Nike and you can bet that they paid a lot of money to put this in Back To The Future 2.

This technique is called Product Placement and it is a really common and powerful tool that the marketing industry uses to influence people to buy their products. Alright, let’s get the hard part out of the way, let’s talk about the definition, so then we can start focus on good and famous examples, basically the funny part. Product Placement is a type of advertising in which a branded products and services are in full display during a drama production, it could be a movie, a TV Show, among others. The goal of this technique is to generate in the consumers a kind of a positive feeling towards the products that are mentioned, discussed or shown throughout the program. This affects the consumer decision process, because it can make the consumers to develop a more strong connection to the product, since their favorite characters are using that brand. Now, I will show you a lot of examples of this technique. I just need to say something; I could spend this whole post talking about Back To The Future franchise, because there are so many product placement is those movies (DeLorean, Texaco, Pizza Hut, Mattel, Black & Decker, among others), however I am not going to do that, I will try to focus in different movies and TV Shows. Ok, I just need to say that the Pepsi future bottle in this movie is pretty cool, I still do not understand why Pepsi did not made this bottle yet.

Now, let’s start talking about other programs. One of my favorite TV show nowadays is Arrow and in this show there is a lot of Windows product placement, every time you can see someone using a windows tablet or laptop, it is unbelievable.

There are a lot of other great examples; Reese’s Pieces made a product placement on the movie ET, one of the most iconic and classic movies in the history. This action made the profits of Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces to go up 65%.

There are some situations in which brands appear in the movie, but they did not pay for it. One of the most famous examples about this is the movie Cast Away; two brands come to mind, if you already watched this movie, Wilson and FedEx. First, Wilson did not pay to be in the movie, but this is understandable, it was kind of a character of the movie, but it was just a product. However, FedEx got airplanes, a lot of delivery boxes, employees and even the CEO of the company in the movie, and they did not pay. Ok, I will repeat that, they did not give a penny to be in this movie. The story behind it, it’s that they were concern about giving they brand image, because of the plane accident, but in the end they allowed the movie to used it. With that they ended up getting a lot more brand awareness especially outside of the United States.

There are a lot of different examples, if you want to see more, this video show some great ecamples of product placement in movies, some of them I talked about in this post.

Thanks for reading this post; I hope you liked it. Feel free to comment and say any other product placement that you remember. See you next time.

Take care,

Leo.

Reference:

http://theweekmagazine.tumblr.com/post/37716365399/hersheys-reeses-pieces-saw-a-reported-65-jump

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/product-placement.asp

http://mentalfloss.com/article/18383/stories-behind-10-famous-product-placements

http://static.businessinsider.com/image/51915140ecad046a07000002/image.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIt5y89tXB9lJi7Yc7MhNWfFXyha8AX0sHjTpTIfj7saIEkL81mpNAVHb06NMWFPSR478RbgGs6WBXpKeR27dBT8s3av190bISkaaTHJuyb1o2R5HJaXm4AcLyAzqt-mB4CD60c4eMM3s/s1600/arrow-se4-episodefour-monitorc-710640.png

http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mckulvrD821rjm87po1_500.jpg

https://etsucfaa.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/bttf_shoes1.jpg

http://www.brandstories.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fedex-castaway-tom-hanks-brand-story.png