The New Watchmen Trailer Campaign

For the past week, some friends of mine gave me links to a video on you tube. As I open it, I begin to watch a very old looking news report: NBS Nightly News with Ted Philips, March 11th 1970. It features a super cheesy news report about Dr. Manhattan. The video is of course a fake news report. It’s kind of watchmen trailer which seems to be a new campaign strategy for promoting the new watchmen movie coming this March. All I can say is that it very cool.

The campaign’s sort of headquarters is this site called New Frontiersman and employs social sites like Flicker and Twitter. Taking a look into this, I found a massive amount of posts and material that seems to have come from this alternate universe (the one where the Watchmen exists). It’s splendid; you can get a hold of anything from pictures of the Apollo mission where doctor Manhattan is present in the moon, and you could also read old government files.

This I think would be a very successful marketing ploy, reminiscent of The Dark Knight’s dead joker campaign (they spread fake news of a dead guy dressed in a Joker costume). The Watchmen trailers are definitely following the footsteps of TDK’s huge success. Plus, the material is so smart and delicious; fan boys will piss their pants.

However, the difference between The Dark Knight’s web campaign and this Watchmen campaign is that TDK only used one or a few central sites, this Watchmen campaign is focused on getting out as much material into every possible web space available to it. Dan Light, is one of the leaders of this online watchmen trailer operation. He says that he would be hard pressed to come up with another example of a web campaign that is on the same level as this one. Light comments that campaign is flawless: it’s so organic in the way it uses core watchmen elements to enrich audience participation and appreciation at the same time.

The New Frontiersmen site got two hundred thousand hits in the first seven days of its launch. On the other hand, the Dr. Manhattan news video got viewed more than one hundred ten thousand times in its first day. What’s more remarkable is couple thousand blog entries about either video or site. This says a lot about the material. People only write or blog about things when they really want to spread the news.

I suppose these Watchmen trailer effort will be the new benchmark for other future movies. However, not all movies can be marketed this way. It of course depends on the material.