Movie Marketing Madness: The Love Guru

Posted by Chris

June 17, 2008

Mike Myers seems to thrive when he has a character to play, and he’s very good at it. His few efforts at roles that didn’t necessitate elaborate make-up and costuming – How I Married An Axe Murderer is the first one that comes to mind – have been middling affairs that haven’t succeeded at becoming popular culture touchpoints. (Note: I actually quite like most of Axe Murderer. You’ve got the whole “Head! Down!” scene that I quote endlessly and I’m still looking for ways to work “Hard-hearted harbinger of haggis” onto my business cards.) Myers as at his best when he’s immersing himself in a character with a wig (or skull-cap) and, likely, an accent.

That’s why The Love Guru seems to be so natural a movie for Myers to make. Based on a character he’s been reportedly developing for years, the movie has him playing The Guru Pitka, India’s second-most famous guru and a spouter of all sorts of generic feel-good bromides that, of course, the public just laps up because they’re unchallenging and kind of funny. Pitka is called upon to save the marriage of a player on the Toronto Mapleleafs haukee (I’m only passingly familiar with the sport) team because that will help him get his head back in the game in time for the playoffs.

So Pitka comes to America and wackiness ensues as he navigates a cast of eccentric characters. Let’s look at how Paramount is selling this, the first of two big-budget/big-star comedies being released this week.

Posters

The teaser poster that was first released focuses solely on Myers, whose name appears at the top of a poster that features solely his face. He certainly does look slightly comical with the huge hair and outrageously long beard and mustache, a look that gets an obvious “This is a comedy!” underlining in the form of his raised eyebrow.

His face actually appears twice here – the second time in the form of a small illustration that forms the “o” in the movie’s title treatment. Below all that is the “His karma is huge” copy point that lets us all know, comfortingly, that the movie will not make any attempt to avoid easy sexually-based puns or other jokes. Considering this is part and parcel with the public brand Myers has created that’s actually a good thing that kind of reinforces to the audience that they’re entering familiar ground should they come see this movie.

The theatrical version introduced us to the rest of the cast. Myers sits in the middle, with the same expression on his face and the title treatment still hovering below him. To his right sits co-star Jessica Alba, wearing heels and a low-cut, short black dress, which is all we really expect of her acting abilities. Abover her is Romany Malco, who (and I know this since he’s the one wearing a hockey jersey) plays the hockie player player Pitka must help. Justin Timberlake as an odd-ball servant of some sort is next and finally Verne Troyner appears to let us all know that this movie does indeed reunite him with Myers.

This version is head and shoulders better than the teaser, simply because it’s a more interesting graphic assemblage. There’s not a whole lot going on – everyone is just standing there so it’s not like any action other than the ability to hold a flower is implied or otherwise communicated – but it’s still a bit more interesting.

Neither poster, though, is exactly exciting. Yes, they do an alright job of communicating the fact that Mike Myers has a new movie coming out and such but beyond that they’re pretty static and uninspiring.

The Trailers

I don’t want to and I never wanted to find the teaser trailer funny. I shouldn’t find it funny since it’s full of obvious jokes that serve primarily to show us that Myers finds himself really amusing.

But darn-it-all I think it’s pretty funny.

The spot starts out by introducing Pitka himself and his self-help institute, giving us a glimpse of just how shallow his teachings are and how devoted his followers are. It then provides a pretty good setup of why Pitka is coming to North America and what he’s been hired to do.

In between all that, though, are plenty of one-off gags – both visual and verbal – that serve to remind the audience that the movie is stocked with the sort of humor of all sorts that Myers is known for. The bit with him bending his legs and scratching his ear is a perfect example of the sort of visual set-piece that Myers excels in, a ridiculous concept featuring a caricatured character that winds up being so illogical it either completely turns you off or completely sucks you in.

There are also, of course, dick jokes like the one where Pitka becomes aroused when Alba’s character hints at a casual-lesbian past. And just in case you didn’t think Troyer’s presence was going to go unnoticed, we see both the same sort of Freudian-slip sequence we got all throughout the Austin Powers movies as well as a shot of him being hit by a hockey puck, after which he’s compared to an Academy Awards statue.

Again – I’m not saying that these things aren’t funny. Despite my better judgement I was indeed laughing. What I am saying is that this trailer is meant very much to reinforce the Myers brand and create a sense of familiarity in the audience as a result of that.

The later theatrical trailer actually diverted quite a bit from the first. It opens with a scene that’s likely not in the movie, showing Pitka using a Narration Machine to change his voice into that of the trailer voice-over guy. Before going further – this is a little worrisome. Anytime a campaign has to obviously go outside the film itself for material I start to think they’re worried about the power of the movie’s material to appeal to audiences. That’s especially true when it’s used for the second trailer – If this were the first one I’d actually be alright with it since this sort of thing is pretty common for teasers. But using it the second time around makes me think they ran out of enough funny footage to include in the trailer and so had to include something else.

Moving forward, similar notes are hit and some familiar scenes are shown as well as a handful of new ones. Almost completely pushed to the background is the whole “Come to America to save the marriage of a famous hokkee player” plot in favor of more sight-gags. Obviously the studio felt this was going to be the stronger tactic in a crowded summer and on a crowded comedy weekend. This second one is noticeably weaker than the first, probably because the jokes are paced a bit closer together, without the space to breathe that the first one gave them. Not a bad effort, but not quite as strong as the first.

Online

The movie’s official website loads up with the same image that’s on the theatrical poster. But before diving in there’s all sorts of stuff to talk about that’s listed here.

Starting at the top right (minus the registration form that’s masquerading as “Get updates from The Guru”) our first stop is “Visit Guru Pitka on YouTube.” That takes you to the movie’s YouTube channel, which is the home of the a bunch of Mini Sutras, or bite-sized bits of comedic wisdom from the Guru. Oddly, they’re all delivered by Myers with his mouth moving within a still picture. I’m not sure why this was done, exactly, but at least they stuck with it and made it consistent. They’re actually played quite straight and are moderately funny depending on how funny you’ve already found the campaign.

Next up is the movie’s MySpace page. The page features a chance to win a trip to Maui which you can enter by friending the page yourself, a tool that lets you upload pictures that then have the Guru added to them, e-cards and a soundboard that contains a handful of audio clips from the movie. There’s also the bobble-head widget, a series of ridiculous photos featuring the Guru posing with famous people and other things like photo galleries and such that are pretty common on MySpace sites. The Mini Sutras also make another appearance here along with a short exclusive clip from the film.

Coming around the other side is MyFavoriteGuru, basically a popularity vote between Guru Pitka and Deepak Chopra. In a nice touch, there are icons at the bottom that allow you to easily share the site via Facebook, Delicious or other sites.

The Facebook Fan Page that was created features a lot of the same stuff that was on the MySpace page but also has some new content. In addition to what we’ve seen before there was a widget you could either add to your own Facebook profile or snag for a stand-alone site. And instead of trying to win a vacation you could enter to win a year’s worth of free Cinnabons by becoming a fan of the page, which is actually kind of worth it. Other content includes links to some of the other related sites, the mobile game that you could play and mobile wallpapers to download. The movie also sponsored new “tickle tickle” functionality in the popular Super Poke Facebook application, which should be familiar to anyone who’s seen the trailer since “tickle tickle” is one of the jokes there. I like that for the same reason I liked it when Paramount did something similar for Indiana Jones, that they decided to just build on something that was already being used instead of trying to create their own tool.

The Guru Pitka also has his own site. Content there includes “About,” the same sort of photos we saw on MySpace, “Yoga Poses,” (stills of the crazy yoga sequence in the movie) and things like the Mini Sutras and a “Word of the Week.” Widgets are available for the latter two things. The site is kind of a logical extension since Myers and the studio have been trying to establish Pitka as a real persona for so long.

That site contains links to the Guru’s profile on BeliefNet, non-denominational community, that also has the Mini Sutras and a few other bits of content like photos. There’s also a link to a blog post on IntentBlog, a site run by the Chopras, about their problems with Pitka’s teachings, something that likely confused many of the site’s mainstream readers and kind of crosses some editorial/marketing lines considering it’s never disclosed that this is a stunt for the movie.

All of these little microsites and features were interesting and all – Sharon Waxman even got enticed to write about them with a promise to her site by Myers himself – and they did a decent job of reinforcing the brand idea with the online audiences.

OK, let’s get back to the actual official site now.

I’ll start off by dealing the the Menu on the right hand side.

“About the Film” gets us started, with a quick Story synopsis that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t learn in the first trailer and some Notes. Those Notes are pretty decently written, talking about everything from how Myers came up with the character and tested it to how they cast the supporting players to how Myers made it a point to feature his beloved hockey in the movie.

Next up is “Video.” This turns out to be a rather poor offering, with just the second trailer, two TV Spots and three extended Clips, all of which contain scenes we’ve seen in the trailers already. Not sure why they couldn’t have included all three TV spots or both of the trailers, but they are all notable by their omission. On the plus side, the video is available for embedding as well as downloading in a couple differnet formats.

There seem to be just under 20 or so stills in the “Gallery.” But while they may not be all that interesting, what is interesting is that you can email each individual pic to a friend or download it to your desktop as wallpaper. I would have liked to have seen just a straight download functionality, but this isn’t bad at all so I’m not complaining.

All this talk of downloading actually leads us to “Downloads,” which actually has a bunch of content. There are four Desktops you can grab, a Screensaver, a handful of IM Icons, the theatrical version of the Poster (but not the teaser for some reason) and a bunch of Mobile Downloads. Finally there are Banners which you can not just download but can also choose to grab the HTML or other embed code so you can easily put them on your own site, something that is just fantastic. I love this move since it makes the passing on of someone’s enthusiasm for the movie not only as easy as possible but does so in a way the studio can likely track the success of. Nice work.

“Cast and Crew” is more or less the standard write-ups of the stars of the film and the people who made it happen behind the camera. “Features” is simply a round-up of the various things like links to the Bobble Head widget, the My Favorite Guru site and other such things that we’ve seen scattered around the web or on the movie’s social network pages.

A lot of those items are replicated if you mouse-over the “EIEIO” symbol on the left-hand side of the page, with each of the letters of “drama” taking you to a different feature.

Not listed anywhere – at least not that I saw – was Pitka’s Book Club. The site is all graphics, with images that show the ridiculous titles to the books Pitka has supposedly written, and it’s basically one big link back to Pitka’s personal site.

Advertising and Cross Promotions

The three TV spots that were created contain a surprising amount of original content. Notably, they more deeply explore Jessica Alba…I mean they more deeply explore the plot that has Jessica Alba’s character contracting The Guru Pitka to come to America to help her hockey team. They’re pretty good, hitting a largely different tune than the trailers and actually adding to the whole body of content instead of simply being edited – and therefore weaker – versions of those trailers.

The main cross-promotion with the movie came, unsurprisingly, from the NHL. The league created a series of co-branded TV spots that featured both movie and real game footage that ran during the league championship games. It also turned over a portion of its website to Myers, who blogged and offered advice as Guru Pitka.

Media

Something that kept popping up here and there – especially in my own email inbox – was the displeasure of certain Hindu groups over the perceived disrespect of their culture and religion the movie contained. Hindu protesters sought a ban of the movie in India and other countries, achieving a few little sparks of success here and there but certainly nothing that seriously impacted the movie’s fortunes or anything. Ultimately Deepack Chopra himself – who appears in the movie – defended the film, saying he was comfortable with it since it is not actually disrespectful to anyone and that he himself is the butt of the overall joke.

Myers was also the conveniently timed host of the MTV Movie Awards just a couple weeks before the movie came out, an appearance he used to not only promote The Love Guru but also favorably reinforce his own personal brand by creating a series of vignettes, including one that featured co-star Jessica Alba and one that brought in Dana Carvey to recreate Wayne’s World for the first time in years.

He also appeared – in character as The Guru Pitka – on the season finale of “American Idol,” where he came in on his little motorized pillow thing from the trailer, a device that was then co-opted by host Ryan Seacrest.

NBC jumped on the bandwagon of hype surrounding the movie to air a Best of Saturday Night Live: Mike Myers special that was actually hosted by the star.

Sending out cool swag like this Pitka Magic 8-Ball thing is also a cool way to get some press coverage that doesn’t involve honking off a whole religious movement.

Overall

I’ll admit that I really like this campaign, despite the fear that this admission might further damage any credibility I might have left hanging around.

The reason, I think, that I like it as much as I do is that Myers is obviously having fun and making himself laugh. He seems to be committed to the persona he’s created and is fully invested in it. The combination of just fully diving into the character and it being he’s so obviously enjoying makes it very attractive to me for the same reasons Will Ferrell’s movies always look interesting.