Richard Barnes On Why 2015 Will be the Biggest Blockbuster Release Period in Hollywood History

If Spider-Man set the bar high with Evian, watch out for the summer of 2015. All six major studios are putting their billion dollar babies into the marketplace within a window of a few months - Star Wars, Bond, The Avengers, The Fast and the Furious, the Hobbit and The Hunger Games to name a few. Brands looking for high profile blockbusters with serious shelf appeal are spoilt for choice. Never before have studio’s been so willing to collaborate creatively to ensure cut through and awareness, offering brands the chance to go above and beyond the standard on-pack presence. But brands need to start planning now.

Spider-Man is one of the jewels in the Sony crown and they choose their partners carefully. Brand & Deliver were tasked with finding a global partner who could not only deliver incredible visibility through a high volume on-pack promotion, but would support with a bold and truly engaging support campaign. We had to deliver a game-changer.

The journey started a year from release, when we met with the Danone Global team in Paris as part of a multi-brand presentation. They were instantly engaged with Spider-Man, but there were many hurdles ahead of us. Danone is a collection of regional and local brands such as Evian, Volvic, Font Vella, Hayat and many more and these brands have phenomenal local teams and marketing activity. We needed to work with the global team to secure their individual buy-in to the partnership. Throughout the early summer of 2013, we did just that and by Q3 we had commitment from over 20 markets. Each brand approached the property differently and needed to be supported individually. The Brand & Deliver design team were also enlisted to create a toolkit for several markets.

Spider-Man made a guest-star appearance within Evian’s existing Baby & Me campaign whereby the character is met by a ‘baby’ version of himself in reflection. This treatment ran on-pack (18m+ packs), in retail POS (20,000+ sites) whilst the creative team at BETC produced a phenomenal 60” advert (see below) that ran on air in all territories, but went viral via the brand’s YouTube channel and has had almost 19m views.

In addition, Font Vella, Spain
Spain’s number 1 water brand focused all their energy into retail activation and delivered 18,000 stores, 15.5m bottles with mega-sized installations in retail outlets. Hayat, in Turkey,
delivered 4m bottles in 37,000 stores and a bespoke TVC. Mizone in China
 had 30m bottles across 515,000 stores, a TVC and other advertising. B’Lue, an expanding new player in the Indian market, supported the partnership with an on-pack (7m bottles) in 100,000 stores and a TVC.

The results of the global deal broke all previous records for movie partnerships. Five brands within the Danone Waters portfolio partnered The Amazing Spider-Man 2. That equated to 700 million bottles of movie branded water with a $20m ATL investment.

So buckle up for 2015, the potential for brand creativity in movie partnerships is enormous, but get planning now.