Movie Marketing Madness: Bruno

It’s always a source of comedic material to have those who consider themselves hipper and more seriously attuned than the general public make fun of something that’s bland and generically popular. Mystery Science Theater 3000, Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show – they’re all examples of a bunch of really funny and really intelligent people coming together and having a few (well-deserved) laughs with their audience at how anyone could find something like Family Circus amusing.

Basically there’s a whole swath of the comedic world dedicated to laughing at the squares.

In the last several years there’s been no bigger example of this than Sasha Baron Cohen. He’s created a catalog of characters that, which each unique and different, all have in common the fact that they’re designed to pull one over on the subject of their derision, with the audience laughing along at how unhip some people can be. We saw one of those creations, Borat, a few years ago. In that feature film Cohen, as Borat, went across the country as if he were some sort of cultural ambassador, a clever ruse to expose how narrow-minded some people were and how others reacted to someone who was just completely inappropriate on every level.

What Cohen does is, on every level, performance art. It’s not that he’s trying to be funny himself it’s that he’s making the whole thing into something for the audience to be amused, even if it’s uncomfortably so, at. In that regard he’s the modern day decedent of someone like Andy Kaufman in how he pushes boundaries and forces the audience to go outside their own traditional definitions of comedy.

His latest feature film mines another of his earlier character creations: Bruno. Bruno is a flamboyant homosexual fashion maven who, in the movie, is coming to America to see what people are like here.

Yeah.

The Posters

There was just one poster that I saw but it gets the basic point across.

In that one poster Cohen, as Bruno, stands in a field of yellow flowers dressed in an…interesting yellow outfit. It’s outrageous as a visual and Cohen certainly looks committed to the character, as always, and it works for what it needs to do, which is draw the connection between this and Borat and position this movie as attractive to anyone who liked that one.

Unfortunately I think the way it draws that connection is a little too spot on and actually defeats the joke. With the copy “Borat was so 2006″ the poster simultaneously makes the connection in the audience’s mind and also makes sure we *know* this is Cohen pulling our collective chain. It’s not like we didn’t know that already, at least not those of us who pay attention to such things, but we don’t need to have it spelled out for us in this way, which takes away all remaining vestiges of our suspension of disbelief.

It also seems a little dismissive of Borat, like this is the newer, fancier version and Borat is the old model to be abandoned. I’m not sure that’s what it was going for, in fact I’m pretty sure it’s not, but that’s the impression I get regardless.

The Trailers

The first trailer released was, unsurprisingly, a red-band version. It began with reminding us of how outrageous Borat was and how much we enjoyed it before using the same “that was so 2006″ line the poster uses.

What follows then is even more outrageous – and even occasionally funny – footage from Bruno. There’s him explaining he’s gay to a Sears employee (Oh isn’t it funny how some people react to gay people), him picking up a black baby from the luggage carousel at an airport and then taking the kid on a moped ride and on a talk show to explain the adoption (right….) and him busting in on a Fashion Week catwalk event wearing a suit of Velcro (didn’t Letterman do this in 1983?). The red-band designation seems to stem from two things: A topless woman at a swinger’s party and Bruno asking a self-defense instructor how to defend himself against a man with two dildos.

The all-ages version opens the same way, bringing to mind remembrances of Borat. It’s roughly the same trailer, just with those two bits removed.

The problem I think I have with these trailers is that it’s hard to see that anyone is not in on the joke. From the talk-show host that lobs seemingly scripted questions to him and the audience’s stereotypical reactions to the fact that there’s NO WAY a bunch of Bible-belt hunting buddies OR the U.S. Army would just allow some flamboyant homosexual to come and film the goings-on, everyone seems to have given their tacit approval to being filmed and being part of the gag.

Online

The main online hub for the movie was not a traditional website. Instead it was a skinned MySpace profile called MeinSpace, on which Bruno has a profile.

The page was designed in a very cool manner, extending the mythology nicely. At the top of the page there’s a video introduction that plays that includes all the wacky, outrageous stills that have been released.

Below that is the red-band trailer and then links to the all-ages trailer and other videos, including a TV spot and the video from his appearance at the recent MTV Movie Awards, something that’s addressed more below. There are also photos and ringtones and more that you can view and download.

In addition to MeinSpace the rest of the movie’s online strategy is built around social networks as well. There was a Facebook profile that contained pictures, videos and a Live Premiere Webcast app. There was also a Twitter profile where he posted all kinds of wacky one-liners.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Mainly the advertising for Bruno came in the form of a handful of TV spots. There were about three created and released though the only place I’ve seen them is online. They’re all basically recut and edited versions of the trailer and they’re all wildly inappropriate for almost all audiences. I don’t see any cross-promotional partners or anything else, but as we’re about to see the publicity efforts will more than make up for that.

Some online advertising was also done, including the use of Facebook’s new Hybrid Engagement Ad, a new format that ties into the Facebook Fan Page created for the movie. There was also a bit of outdoor advertising done, including on the top of New York City taxi cabs as documented – with hysterical commentary on the umelaut – by Costa.

Universal also was among the very few to secure an ad in some form on the main page of Twitter. A small box sometimes appeared that linked to CinemaTweets, a site that was created by Universal and Federated Media for the Bruno campaign that collected all the tweets that used the #cinematweets hashtag, whether they were about Bruno or not. It would be interesting to see them expand this a bit beyond Bruno since I don’t want a site/service like this to die as the marketing for this specific movie fades.

Media and Publicity

An good amount of online ink was spent covering the movie’s filming tactics and the buzz around those became a story in their own right. Coverage of the stunts Cohen was pulling around the U.S. to compile footage were reported and scrutinized in and of themselves, resulting in a flurry of publicity for the film. That sort of really early buzz could work for the movie by building anticipation for how it’s all going to be put together or potentially work against it since the surprise of the embarrassing situations that have been caught on film will be significantly diminished.

Some examples of those tactics:

Cohen’s antics at a couple of fashion shows in Milan in September. Cohen, in character of course, crashed a couple shows and managed to get arrested – or at least removed from the buildings – as a result.
Cohen even used the rallies protesting Proposition 8 in California 8. Cohen showed up not as Bruno, though, but at another character of his named “Straight Dave,” likely a counter-personality or something to Bruno’s flamboyant homosexual.
Cohen tricked his way on to the base of the Alabama National Guard, using the idea that he was filming a German documentary to get his way into that situation, a scene we see in the trailers.
A Los Angeles high school was reprimanded by – and then broke away from – its school district after it hosted a racy photo shoot with Bruno that involved its football team.

Then there was a lot of buzz among movie lovers when footage was debuted at this year’s SXSW, footage that was preceded by a taped introduction by Cohen.

Unsurprisingly the film was initially slapped with an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, something that can’t have been unexpected and might even have been welcome, if not outright orchestrated, by Universal to keep the “OMG this film is going to be crazy controversial” buzz going. Of course it eventually won an R-rating to that it could go into relatively wide release and not get banned from all advertising outlets.

In yet another stunt to prove how outrageous the character is, Bruno literally flew down to the stage of the MTV Movie Awards in a very revealing body suit and a pair of wings. But there was a technical SNAFU half-way to the stage and he had to make an emergency landing in the middle of the audience, right where rapper Eminem was sitting. This resulted in Cohen’s naked hind-quarters planting right in Eminem’s face while Cohen made apologies and tried to continue on with his award presentation. The stunt was supposed to look like an accident but was obviously staged, a belief many held and which was backed up when one of the show’s writers admitted as much on his blog, though the post was later pulled down.

Unfortunately there was a bit of the same sort of problematic publicity generated by Cohen’s antics in the filming of this film that there was in the filming of Borat. A woman sued Cohen, saying that the tussle resulting from a stunt resulted in her being injured and confined to a wheelchair for a period of time, but the reality of the claim is up in the air. NBC Universal, shortly after the suit was filed, issued a statement saying the claim was baseless and that the footage from the event shows there was no contact between the two and so Cohen was not responsible for any injuries she might have suffered.

Ultimately the press for the movie centered around whether it was a condemnation of homophobia or a validation of it. If you read Brook Barnes’ NYTimes take-down of the movie, you’ll see that it manages to achieve both of those goals precisely because people will get from it whatever conclusions happen to match their own world views. If someone is homophobic – and they see the film to begin with, which isn’t likely – they’ll come out nodding their heads that yep, the gays are out to make fun of Middle American Conservatives. If someone isn’t they’ll come out of it nodding their heads at how ridiculous Cohen has made all those homophobes look.

The MeinSpace thing got a bit of coverage in some of the media and advertising trade press, with the angle being that the use of MySpace for such a cool, hip movie campaign could help make the social network, by association, cool and hip again.

Cohen even appeared on the cover of a recent issue of Esquire, fully naked put posed artfully so as to, thankfully, not expose anything. That appearance became a local story here in Chicago when the manager of a newsstand at O’Hare Airport put the magazine behind one of those blinders that are usually reserved for Playboy and other magazines that feature controversial material. This despite, as an example used by Chicagoist shows, a similar Esquire issue featuring a woman who’s naked but not showing anything remained uncovered. Similar things happened elsewhere in the country.

At the last minute the movie had to undergo a bit of a trim, with the studio cutting a scene involving Bruno mocking Michael Jackson the day the singer died, which happened to be the same day the movie was scheduled to have its big premiere. That’s a rare showing of restraint but I don’t think anyone would argue with the move.

Overall

This is a decent campaign that Universal has put together for a movie that, in all honesty, is probably not going to have much mainstream appeal. That’s not a fault of the studio or the campaign it’s executed, it’s just (I think) a reality of the place the movie-going audience is in right now. Bruno is not going to be on the “To See” list after Transformers 2 for many people. It’s more likely to be on the “To See” list of people who have recently seen Moon or something like that and are looking for a movie that pushes boundaries a bit more.

That being said I think there’s a lot to like about the campaign. It’s funny from beginning to end and I admire the way Cohen plays the character throughout the push, never dropping from Bruno mode for very long in an effort to really sell it as the “documentary” it purports to be. That’s probably the strongest facet of the campaign and as long as things remain firmly attached to the force of will that Cohen possesses it remains funny and well-done.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

7/10/09: Trendhunter rounds up 16 of the most outrageous publicity stunts Sasha Baron Cohen engaged in to promote the movie.
7/10/09: The relaunch of OK Magazine’s website was accompanied by full-site take-over ads for Bruno that included a feature to vote on people’s favorite expressions from the character.
7/10/09: Cohen made a rare “as himself” appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman” this week, talking about the making of some of the movie’s more difficult elements. That was followed by an in-character appearance delivering Letterman’s “Top 10? list.
7/10/09: All the activist groups and others who might be offended by the film – an admittedly broad list – are considering how, if at all, they should respond. Here’s my suggestion: Just stay quiet. You’re not going to win this one.
7/17/09: Among those just now realizing they were duped are a set of twins that run a small PR shop in Los Angeles that Bruno the character approaches in an effort to raise his profile. Let’s just say the scene does not reflect well on my profession.