I had a post all mentally written regarding the BuynLarge website that’s been launched by Pixar/Disney in early support of next year’s feature Wall-E. Really it was quite good. But then I fired up my RSS reader and found that Alan had somehow found a way to read my thoughts and wrote it before I got around to it.
The site really is quite magnificent from a marketing point of view. It’s produced so cleverly and does such a good job of completely immersing the visitor in the fictional brand, which is the one that produces the title character, that it comes off, as Alan says, like an actual company.
To complete the effect they even released a number of informational vidoes/ads online, one of which you can view here.
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Comic-Con also served as the platform for the release of this teaser poster for the film. While I think it’s great in and of itself, it occurs to me that almost every Pixar film has had some sort of Art Deco-esque artwork produced for it, at least the most recent ones. The Incredibles is the example that comes to mind first and foremost but there was also a series of early artwork for Ratatouille that was very deco.
Finally, Slashfilm has a number of other promotional posters for the Buy n Large corporation that have been released.
There have been a number of movies in the last few years whose campaigns have included some sort of fictional company’s advertisements. I, Robot and The Island are the two that I can think of off the top of my head. This is becoming a pretty common tool to use in the extreme early stages of a movie’s campaign when that movie is set sometime in the future. It’s a fun way to break through the clutter and try to bring the audience into the world of the movie but it’s also one that is only, in truth, good for a limited time.
It would be difficult to build an entire campaign around such a conceit and it’s doubtful too many studio executives would even allow it to be tried. That’s because the marketing eventually needs to brand the movie itself in the minds of the audience and stop being clever.
But that doesn’t mean someone (and I’m looking at you Pixar) couldn’t try. Even if it’s run as a parallel effort to a more traditional campaign it would interesting to see how an angle like this could be stretched out and expanded over the course of a full year, running from teaser to theatrical release.
I know that’s asking a lot, but it would prove that a full-length alternate-reality based campaign is at least possible. But it would require a lot of hard work, creativity and the same sort of unified brand effort as running an actual corporate campaign. Anyone wanna take a shot?
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