Movie Marketing Madness: Cold Souls

What is the soul? We all claim to have one in the spiritual sense and yet there’s nothing that can be pointed to, nothing that can be examined after our death that is “the soul.”

Cold Souls does, though, make the soul a physical thing. The movie focuses around an actor named Paul Giamatti, played by Paul Giamatti, who one day decides that in order to fully prepare for a role in “Uncle Vanya, he needs to get rid of his soul. So he enlists the services of a company that will remove and store that soul. But he finds that it’s not quite as simple as that, as being without his soul winds up having more of an impact than he anticipated. Plus there’s also the annoyance of his stored soul winding up being missing when he goes to retrieve it.

If it sounds very meta it is. It’s not that Giamatti is playing himself, it’s that he’s playing the role of a movie actor named Paul Giamatti. And yes, its exploration of what the soul is and what role it plays in our lives is very much an examination of what motivates us and makes us who we are. It’s drawing a lot of comparisons to Being JohnMalkovich and, quite frankly, rightfully so. It’s a bit different in execution but looks like it mines similar ground in terms of philosophical explorations.

The Posters

The movie’s one poster made it clear, more or less, what the movie was going to be about and what the major selling point is. It showsGiamatti sitting in the middle of the poster, the tiniest of a series of nesting dolls that expands to be his head. So he’s sitting inside of his own head, an image that comes as close as I think it’s possible to explaining the plot of the movie.

The way the image hints at some sort of metaphysical storyline and the inclusion of Giamatti means the poster was designed specifically for fans of independent, story-driven movies. Which is good because that’s who the movie is aimed at. So it’s not a matter of attracting them to the movie – awareness (as we’ll talk about below) in this crowd is already likely to be pretty high. So all the studio has to do is not screw it up and I think this poster achieves that goal of not failing.

The Trailers

The trailer starts off by introducing us to Paul Giamatti and the circumstance he finds himself in, unable to break through some sort of mental or psychological block and fully commit to a role in a play he’s doing. He feels stuck…weighed down…like he can’t get out of a rut or something. But then we see him read a story about a company that removes souls and he visits said company.

That goes by pretty fast before we’re shown soulless Giamatti, who’s having his own set of problems. He’s acting weird is acting differently around his wife. So he decides to have his soul reinstated, only to find out it’s been stolen from storage and is probably in Russia somewhere on the black market.

If you are at all interested in independent or offbeat film you’re going to attracted to this trailer like gnats to my forehead when I’m cutting the grass. An existential examination of the soul with a greatly respected actor in this area playing a fictionalized version of himself. It’s pretty funny to seeGiamatti playing this part and the entire thing winds up looking very interesting and certainly will be viewed as a serious-minded bit of counter-programming against G. I. Joe.

Online

The official website is, even for a smaller movie, pretty small and sparse on the content front. After you continue on from the trailer that starts off on the main page, you get taken to the “About” page. There you’ll find a decent Synopsis of the movie’s plot as well as a Writer/Director Statement that’s written by Sophie Barthes and which explains more clearly than most production notes do, why she created the story and what she was trying to say with it.

“Video” has the movie’s trailer as well as three clips from the film that fill in some of the plot points.

“Cast & Crew” has profiles of the film’s major players and, in the case of the cast, three pictures of each actor taken from the film. It’s unfortunate, though, that those pictures aren’tdownloadable.

“Press” just gives you a link to download the PDF version of the press notes.

There’s also a Facebook page for the movie that contains the marketing collateral as well as news about the film’s publicity campaign. The MySpace page is mainly just the trailer, some photos and little else. The Samuel Goldwyn YouTube page has the trailer and a handful of clips.

The online campaign also included the extending of The Soul Storage Company, the corporation depicted in the movie, being given its own website, Twitter profile, Facebook page and even a mock-up of an ad that would appear in The Village Voice. This is fun, even if it’s not the most fully fleshed out effort. The company’s site even has a tool that lets you get rid of your soul online that’s kind of neat, especially since you can post the results to Twitter or Facebook.

My Soul

Apparently the company even did some other advertising in the weeks leading up to release.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Not much on either front, at least not that I’ve seen. I may have come across a couple of web ads for the movie but it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to attract a ton of promotional partners and I’m guessing the paid media budget wasn’t that big so instead it relied greatly on earned media.

Media and Publicity

Much of the publicity and buzz for the movie came out of its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was generally well regarded by critics and other writers. It then went on to appear at later film festivals and continued to accumulate positive word-of-mouth from those appearances, as well as from other pre-release screenings that brought with them word-of-mouth.

There were a generous amount of clips released, including this batch of seven varied scenes that show Giamatti as Giamatti preparing for his soul to be removed, reacting to the process and then going on his journey to find the mis-placed soul.

There was also a decent publicity campaign for the film, as evidenced by the links shared on its Facebook page. The main thrust of that was, unsurprisingly, spearheaded by Giamatti who was interviewed by more than a few publications ranging from FilmThreat to The New Yorker and more.

Overall

It’s a nice little campaign that plays to its strengths – Giamatti’s performance and the pretty high-minded but funny concept – nicely. Everything here is designed to appeal to fans of movies you actually have to pay attention to in order to enjoy and so should work well in moving those folks to action.

Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) the movie is only opening this weekend in New York and LA and then expanding to the rest of the country over the remainder of August. So the movie’s campaign will have to continue working throughout that period to let people in the secondary markets know it’s finally reached them.

PICKING UP THE SPARE

8/7/09: While a number of movies’ campaigns are cited, the Soul Storage Company effort for Cold Souls is the lynch-pin of this AdAge article about the decade long history of “viral” campaigns online in support of films.