Online Movie Marketing Goes Open Source

Months before a movie opens the Internet is flooded with marketing, bloggers talking about the marketing (I realize the irony), stills of on-set action, trailers, etc. Of course this is all to create hype to in turn bolster the box office opening weekend numbers. Many of these campaigns have ungodly amounts of money thrown at them; case in point, The Dark Knight release is more than 3 months away, however marketing efforts, both online and offline, started a year ago including websites, fan interaction at Comic Con 2007, and blogger outreach for buzz. Again, ungodly marketing budgets. A film that is taking a slightly different route than the norm, at least for now, is the new Judd Apatow produced flick Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The plot, according to IMDb, is, “Devastated Peter ([Jason] Segel) takes a Hawaii vacation in order to deal with recent break-up with his TV star girlfriend, Sarah ([Kristen] Bell). Little does he know Sarah's traveling to the same resort as her ex ... and she's bringing along her new boyfriend. Riveting but sure to be funny and a hit at the box office following the do-no-wrong recent work of Apatow and crew. Marketing efforts for the film have been already begun with the standard release trailers, red band trailer, and blog excitement, but the online complex, marvel marketing is not the current path taken for the film. Instead, a recent marketing effort launched last week features a blog from the main character Peter Bretter, played by Apatow favorite Jason Segel, from a Blogger.com open source account. The website, www.ilovesarahmarshall.com, does an excellent job of capturing the twenty-something character attributes of the Peter and the Web 2.0 crowd complete with YouTube videos, cheesy bio, and Likes and Dislikes. Take a look at one of the YouTube videos, pretty hysterical in context: These open source, Web 2.0 devises have been used in prior online campaigns, e.g. Superbad, however this is a funny and appropriate use of these websites and 2.0 means to promote a movie as well as comment on the online community, us. I can only assume that in the coming weeks another site will emerge, www.ihatesarahmarshall.com, or the romance-rich posts will take a turn. The only hiccup I can find in this tactic is that at least some effort went into creating this page, filming video, etc one would think Universal would opt to take their name off the Registrant information. Despite shortcomings, keep a lookout on opening weekend.