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Movie Marketing Madness: No Country for Old Men

After years of playing around with slapstick comedy for a few years to varying levels of success (O Brother Where Art Thou was great, Intolerable Cruelty contained moments of brilliance) the Coens, Joel and brother Ethan, are back into the violent crime genre. No Country for Old Men.

The movie, based on a Cormac McCarthy novel, is about a small-town tough guy (Josh Brolin) who comes across cash and cocaine that have been left at the scene of an accident. Eventually someone (Javier Bardem) is sent to retrieve the contraband, someone who leaves a string of dead bodies in his wake.

Letâ€™s see how Miramax is marketing this bloody, morally ambiguous drama to a public thatâ€™s shown remarkable apathy toward anything that didnâ€™t involve giant robots and which has already financially spiked one Tommy Lee Jones movie (In the Valley ofElah) this fall.

The Posters

The main poster for the movie is just fantastic. Brolin’s character appears in the foreground running across the desert plain while the just plain old creepy visage of Bardem hovers above him. The design manages to be atmospheric and mood-setting without crossing over into silliness. It also manages to convey the key elements of the plot – thatBrolin is running away from Bardem – in a single image, which is the whole point of a poster or other graphical campaign element. So success all around.

A couple months out from the movieâ€™s release the studio released a series of posters that are more or less character-centric one-sheets. These were â€“ and are â€“ very cool. Each one shows one of the main characters, but only from the mid-section down, and each had its own character-appropriate copy point. As Anne Thompson said in her post on the banners, the focus on the guns in these images seems to be part of a play for a more action-geared audience and I think they succeed on that front.

The Trailers

The first and last trailers are really, really cool. Both setup the movie quite nicely, give good explanations as to who the main characters are and what motivations are driving them and set the tone for the movie very effectively. The first spreads its running time around the cast more or less evenly, but the other trailer focuses much more on Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff.

They also differ in the title cards that are interspersed in the spots. The first uses very traditional text that is more or less on-the-nose descriptive of what’s going on. The other one uses the same text format as the title treatment and wordage that’s more in line with the moral quandary of the characters. The final spot also contains quite a few critic quote blurbs praising the film, something that’s important for niche movies like this and which grace not only the trailers but the poster and, as we’ll see, the website as well.

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It’s hard to pick out which one is the best since they both rock quite hard, but I’d say the brand consistency of the third helps it edge just slightly to the lead.

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The center-piece of the movieâ€™s video campaign, without a doubt, was the red-band trailer that was hosted on the movieâ€™s official website. The age-restricted trailer featured a lot more blood and violence than the regular, green-band trailers.

But while the content of the trailer was interesting, the idea of the red-band trailer was the most important thing to consider. As I stated in the opening of this column, and as I stated in a quote to Robert Welkos at the LA Times, itâ€™s been a while since the Coens delved into this sort of cinematic territory. So the red-band trailer in all its violent glory announced to anyone and everyone that the brothers were back to making movies in the same vein as Blood Simple and Millerâ€™s Crossing, a notion borne out by some of the early reviews.

That alone has increased the anticipation and buzz, I feel, being generated around the movieâ€™s release. If it winds up being a success I think theCoens and Miramax can look back at this move and point to it as a major contributor to that success.

Online

The movie’s official website is among some of the best I’ve visited recently, and I’m not just saying that because I know some of the people behind it. The site opens with the by-now familiar “Call it…friend-o” line from Bardem’s hit man then opens to reveal the same imagery used on the poster, a consistency I’m always in favor of. Just-about full-screen video is used for transitions between sections of the site, most of it pulled from the trailers but all of it engaging, as any clips are welcome when the film is as good as this one appears to be.

Moving into the site’s actual content, here’s what we’ve got:

Cast & Filmmakers: The usual bios and filmographies of the major players both in front of and behind the camera. The copy is written pretty well, hitting all the highlights of everyone profiled.
Film: Contains a Synopsis and Production Notes. The former is longer than most of the write-ups most sites give their descriptions and is stronger for it. The latter is broken into four main sections and provides some good insight on how the people developing the movie tried to stay true to the source book as well as create something unique and very Coen-y.
Book: Some more love given to McCarthy’s novel. We get an author bio and an excerpt from the book in the main section of the page. There’s also a link to the official Random House page on the book and two links to buy it, one from Random House directly and one from Barnes & Noble. Nice way to encourage people to check it out.
Gallery: 20 just awesome stills. Surprisingly not all of them are pulled from the trailers as is often the case with pictures featured on official sites.
Downloads: Three Wallpapers, six AIM icons and a Screensaver. Nice. Standard, but nice.
Video: All three trailers, including the red-band version that also gets its own link at the bottom of the page.
Accolades: Here’s where they get to toot their own horn. There are about 12 quotes of varying lengths from different critics touting the film as a masterwork of film. And these aren’t no-name critics either. Ebert, Hammond, McCarthy and others are all there with lines about just how great the movie is.
E-card: Unfortunately still tagged as “Coming Soon.” I’m beginning to think every movie site needs to have one of these contractually. Argh.
News & Links: Oooo…links to the outside web. Awesome. The first is to a story in Time Magazine including a conversation with McCarthy and both Ethan and Joel Coen. The second is to a list of events at the New York City Apple Store, one of which is an appearance by Brolin and Bardem. There’s also a link to the Facebook application (discussed below) and finally a link to download the official press notes for the movie.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

The studio took out a number of online ads for No Country, as well as buying a lot of TV time, at least here in the Chicago area. My guess would be that the few spots I saw were nothing compared to the frequency of the ads on the coasts where all the Oscar voters and other industry executives reside.

The best promotional marketing I came across, though, was the â€œCoin Tossâ€ Facebook application developed by the studio. The app allowed you to pose a question to one of your Facebook friends and define which response, heads or tails, was the correct one. Considering a coin toss is a major component in the movieâ€™s trailer and, I suspect, the larger movie, this was a great contextual idea. It not only engaged the audience in the movieâ€™s world and it was just fun to challenge friends with something like this.

Overall

This is a truly fantastic campaign. Like the movie it’s supporting, the campaign has an air of world-weariness and the attitude of someone who’s lived a long, hard life. That perception is brought about in my mind by a completely consistent effort across media that creates a single, unified brand. Everything – the trailer, the posters, the website – has a similar look and feel. That strikes me as the work of a studio that cares about selling the movie to the RIGHT audience, one that’s going to be sucked into the movie’s world and so wants to use the campaign as the tool to draw them into engagement with the movie’s brand.

There’s not a single weak part to the effort. Every component is strong. My favorite, though, is the Facebook application for its high level of engagement and contextual relevance to previous parts of the campaign, specifically the trailer. While everything else is great, it’s the idea that someone was creative enough and sensitive enough to the branding effort to create something that interesting and fun.

This is one of my favorite all-around campaigns in quite a while and one that I’ll point to as an example of how to brand a movie successfully for some time to come.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

6/18/08: The campaign – including the site designed by Kirk Skodis and the Real Pie Media crew – for No Country for Old Men won for overall Best Campaign at the Key Art Awards. You can read the entire list of winners, including many movies I’ve featured here on MMM, at THR.