Movie Marketing Madness: Bee Movie
I’m going to try and resist the temptation just about every other writer has given in to and not write a story about how Bee Movie is Jerry Seinfeld’s return to the public eye or anything like that. There are plenty of stories out there using that hook so you can go check them out.
What I will tell you is that Jerry Seinfeld is back (DAMMIT!) after years of performing stand up and making the occasional American Express commercial in the new animated feature from Dreamworks, Bee Movie. Seinfeld voices a worker bee who decides he’s going to go out and explore the world outside the hive before accepting his fate inside the hive. While out and about he meets the usual cast of characters, including a mosquito voiced by Chris Rock and a human voiced by Renee Zellweger.
So the challenge for Dreamworks going into this campaign that I see is to sell an animated feature that’s geared toward kids to not only that audience but also adults who are fans of Seinfeld’s old NBC show and his humor in general. The stakes are even higher considering some are saying it’s Dreamworks Animation itself that’s on the line here. Some industry watchers are, according to the Media Biz blog, worrying that a non-sequel starring someone who’s mainly a TV star is not going to find an audience.
The Posters
There were three posters created for the movie, two teasers and a theatrical version.
The two teasers differed in their actual design but were more or less consistent in terms of design, even if they differed in execution.
The first of the two presented the movie’s title in that cliff-side-that’s-slightly-angled-to the-camera way that always reminds me of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. A ton of movies use this look and that happens every time. I look at this and I just wait for a big foot to come down and squash it.
The second showed the title treatment in a more straightforward – and straight-ahead-manner. 99.8 percent of the poster real estate was taken up by a huge “B,” with the main bee luxuriating in the lower curve. Again, the stars get billed but the main focus is on that “B” and that bee.
Both also included tiny little versions of the bee being voiced by Seinfeld. He didn’t get pimped so much, though, with most of the focus going first to the title and second to the fact that this was coming from Dreamworks. They both seemed pretty good at selling the movie as a concept – which is what teasers are supposed to as opposed to later elements that sell the movie as an actual thing.
The final theatrical poste r works really well, I think, at selling the spirit of the movie. This one puts Seinfeld’s bee more front-and-center as he careens out of control pinned to a whirring tennis ball. The image is pulled directly from one of the later trailers, which highlights this scene. But it highlights, if subtly, the idea that the main character is out of his element and out of control. The effectiveness of the image is enhanced if you’ve seen the trailer, but I think it works on its own as well.
The Trailers
Now we come to the best – or at least the most frequently discussed – aspect of the campaign, the trailers. The series of spots created for Bee Movie range from absolutely brilliant to very solid, but I don’t think there’s a bad one in the bunch.
The first of the teaser trailers appeared quite a while ago, back in late 2006. Both it, and its successor, took an interesting angle: They were live-action. Seinfeld, Rock and bunch of others dressed up in the costumes of their respective characters and made like they were shooting the movie for real on a huge, face car windshield. Of course hilarity ensued as the idea of shooting such a scene (which, in its animated version, would get shown in a later spot) is kind of ridiculous. But the spot was hilarious.
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Dreamworks and Seinfeld would later say that the live action angle was decided upon both because it was funny and because it allowed them to transition the audience more smoothly to an animated Seinfeld. I have to say it succeeded on both levels, then.
The second teaser was more of a transitional piece into the movie’s final look. Again taking us to a soundstage with Seinfeld in full bee regalia, this one had him dangling from a wire in front of a huge fake window-box. When the requisite problems occur this time, Seinfeld takes his complaints straight to executive-producer Steven Spielberg. Senor Speilbergo suggests helpfully that the problems everyone’s encountering could be avoided by doing the film animated. The first animated footage then appears and introduces the audience to the look and feel of the actual movie.
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Both of these trailers set an extremely high bar for the later spots to clear. Luckily they succeeded in doing just that, at least for the most part.
The later two trailers (here and here ) introduced various parts o the story. They all more or less started with the introduction of life in the hive and the decision by Seinfeld’s character to leave it and explore the larger world. Then they veered off to highlight different aspects of the movie.
Online
The movie’s official website is a nicely laid-out affair that, thankfully, is just there and does not require that you “Enter the site” or anything like that. It’s a little refreshing. I think this was probably done with younger visitors in mind, simplifying the experience for them as much as possible.
Let’s attack the main content that’s arranged along the bottom toolbar first.
“About the Film” contains a decent Synopsis that is among the first marketing materials to address one of the movie’s key plot points, Barry the bee’s bringing a lawsuit against the human race for stealing honey. This is virtually ignored in all the other stuff out there. Cast and Crew is the usual stuff, but interestingly just shows the voice actor and not the character. That’s surprising since, again, the site seems to be focused on a younger audience. The Production Notes are separated into 10 sub-sections and are nicely written, providing a pretty good look at the journey the film took during production.
“Meet Jerry Seinfeld” is perhaps the most utterly useless feature I’ve seen on a movie website to date. It’s just a paragraph synopsis of the movie next to a picture of Seinfeld. That’s it. Nothing about his creation of the movie, nothing about pitching the idea to Spielberg and all that. A paragraph and a picture. Can everyone else say “Contractually obligated glad-handing?”
There are about 17 or 18 stills in the “Gallery,” most of which are pulled from the trailers. The scrolling is nice but it’s nothing too impressive.
“Videos” contains a ton of stuff. Here’s a breakdown:
- All four trailers
- Three TV spots – That seems like a low number, but whatever
- 10 clips – Surprisingly effective. More like this.
- Featurettes – Three videos that integrate movie footage with behind-the-scenes clips. I like these, they play well and actually achieve the goal of making the movie seem, you know, funny.
- Interviews – Still labeled as “Coming Soon” on the day of the movie’s release. Okey dokey.
- DOLBEE – Just a little short that’s mildly funny about Barry recording some bee sounds in a studio.
- Music Video – This is the “We Got the Bee” video that was discussed earlier, with a bus full of students on their way to meet Seinfeld at Yankee’s stadium and people dancing in the streets while dressed like bees. Really as lame as it sounds.
“Downloads” contains the usual Wallpapers, Buddy Icons and a Screensaver. Signatures is kind of cool. It’s a series of images – some animated some static – that you can download and use as your Outlook email signature. Very cool. This needs to happen more, and in other formats so people can attach them to Gmail, Yahoo Mail or other web-based email systems if they don’t want to attach them to actual business communications. Finally there are a handful of Recipes you can download, all of which are, of course, honey-based.
“The Characters” rights the wrong of the Cast & Crew section by introducing us to the actual denizens of the movie’s world. I only wish there was some connective material between the two since as stand-alone features they only seem to be half fleshed-out.
“Games” has a variety of interactive features, all of which are squarely aimed at the under-10 set. Bee-a-Pet (covered again further down here) is a virtual world of sorts where you take care of Barry and his home. Pimp My Hive lets you decorate a hive and save it as downloadable wallpaper. Spelling Bee is just what it sounds like. New Hive City encourages you to make the hive as productive as possible and Activity Sheets let you download and print out some puzzles and games for the youngsters to play.
The movie’s MySpace page is nothing remarkable, simply replicating some of the official site’s features.
Advertising and Cross-Promotion
While the movie didn’t actually screen at the Cannes Film Festival, Dreamworks did use the event as an opportunity to start some buzz about the flick. In order to accomplish that they once again had Seinfeld don the bee costume. But this time they also had him zip-line from the roof of a building onto a stage. The stunt was covered extensively in both the blog and mainstream press world, mostly for the sheer audacity of it and the very real possibility that Seinfeld could have died in a huge, ridiculous bee costume. Both of those make for good press, and the press accommodated.
The next publicity event that got a fair amount of coverage was Seinfeld’s return to his old stompin’ grounds: NBC’s Thursday night primetime lineup. The star made an appearance on the season premiere of “30 Rock†as himself. In the story he was visiting Fake NBC’s headquarters to put the kibosh on a plan by Alec Baldwin’s character to capitalize on existing footage of Seinfeld, footage he was planning to insert into current programming. Bee Movie got more than its fair share of mentions – as well as a nice shot of the movie’s title treatment on a laptop screen – and Seinfeld even broke The Fourth Wall with a plug for the movie’s opening date.
The appearance was reportedly not part of any paid promotional deal but something the show’s creators cooked up organically and which Seinfeld signed on for. I actually kind of believe that since it was done far too well to be the result of any corporately produced deal.
NBC, also apparently sans actual commercial deal, agreed to run a series of short spots during its programs that would promote the flick but also be entertaining. 20, I believe, were created and ran in the months and weeks leading up to the movie’s debut. Apparently (I don’t watch enough TV to be able to weigh in) they were run so frequently they actually began to honk people off. Kevin Dugan mentioned it to me on Twitter and Brett Love at TV Squad pegs their ubiquity as being among the things he hates most about TV right now. Discontent with the frequency of the promotions seemed to be everywhere.
This is a bit hyper-local, and I don’t know if this was something formal arranged by Dreamworks or just a promotion from a local theater, but the movie got some advertising at a fall festival held at Morton Arborateum near where I live in the Chicago suburbs. A raffle was held and the winners got passes to the movie at said local theater as well as stuffed character dolls. Treat bags handed out to all the kids also included balloons with the movie’s title treatment on them. Nice move on whomever’s part since the festival was packed and they just got the brand in front of a lot of grade-school aged eyeballs.
Moving back to the national scene, candy company Brachs signed on to promote the movie by labeling bags of its candy corn – just in time for Halloween! – with a “Made with real honey” tagline.
There was also a promotional deal with Hewlett-Packard that falls under HP’s “What’s on XXX’s Computer?” campaign. That execution involves a TV spot that, while it doesn’t show Seinfeld’s face, does highlight the movie and sends people to links associated with it. Marketing blogger Karen Hegmann really likes it for a variety of reasons and I agree with most of them. In addition to being an extension of HP’s campaign it’s also an extension of HP’s partnership with Dreamworks Animation, a partnership that has resulted in similar promotional efforts revolving around Shrek the Third and other movies.
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The studio also enlisted the National Honey Board, who created a portion of their website that they devoted to the film. That site includes honey recipes for kids and parents and fact sheets on honey’s nutritional value and more.
Dreamworks even got into the widget business, with Yahoo creating a Bee-a-pet widget that could be added to user’s homepages that created their own virtual bee and environment which they could control. They also partnered with photo-sharing site Slide that let people grab themed skins and audio clips they could add to their slideshows.
Brandweek has a good column on many of the main cross-promotional efforts and much of this has been drawn from that story. The Reel Movie Marketing Blog also has a good post up on the marketing campaign.
The movie’s website had a page devoted to “Partners” and you can see from this shot how many had signed on to help promote the film.
Overall
I hate to say this, but despite some obvious strengths in the trailers, some of the posters and much of the website, it doesn’t matter how good the campaign was. The fact that it was so pervasive and unavoidable in the final weeks to release that it actually started to turn people off of seeing it means it failed. That’s a huge mistake and miscalculation on how many times to expose an audience to the messaging for a single product or brand.
It is a good campaign, playing equally to the younger and older audiences in the formats most likely to be consumed by the appropriate audience. The web was definitely geared toward a younger crowd while the trailers winked knowingly at the older folks. But it stumbled under its own weight at the end and that’s going to be a huge burden to overcome.
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Comments
[...] I was going to write a post about the HUGE Marketing effort behind Bee Movie, the latest animated feature starring Jerry Seinfeld. But Chris at Movie Marketing Madness has already done that so I’ll just point you there instead. I totally agree with his conclusions: I hate to say this, but despite some obvious strengths in the trailers, some of the posters and much of the website, it doesn’t matter how good the campaign was. The fact that it was so pervasive and unavoidable in the final weeks to release that it actually started to turn people off of seeing it means it failed. That’s a huge mistake and miscalculation on how many times to expose an audience to the messaging for a single product or brand. [...]
[...] So why don’t I want to see the movie? Because the non-stop advertising and marketing for it has driven me up the wall — and according to the Movie Marketing Madness blog, I’m not alone. The stunt back in May with Jerry in the big bee suit at Cannes was kind of funny (although I didn’t need to see the clip a thousand times), but it’s been an unrelenting parade of Jerry and the bees for six months now. [...]
I actually would somewhat disagree with part of your assessment. I am a huge animated movie fan and see just about every one that comes out, no matter how (Shrek III, Happily N’ever After) hideous they are…but the windshield trailer I found so un-funny and unentertaining that despite the fairly funny animated commercials, I might be skipping it.
I have noticed the numerous, and frequently self-referential, NBC spots in which he will say something like, “4 Bee movie references…check”. And they, as you say, are right in line with the too much. Too bad, because the animated trailers were good enough that I had almost…ALMOST….overcome my revulsion to the windshield and flower box ones and decided to see it.
[...] Movie (see MMM column here): But it’s executed pretty darn well. The computer animation is good. It’s not great but it’s [...]
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My daughter got her report card and did really well. I’m taking her to the movies to celebrate. Guess which one she wants to see?!
Yep, despite all the A’s on her report card, she wants to see the B movie. sigh
I’ll let you know if it lives up to the thoroughly planned hype you detail so well above.