brand-e

By Steve Mullins. Marketing movies. There’s nothing new in putting together an alternate reality game to promo a new movie, but while much energy has gone into developing ARGs for the sci-fi, fantasy and comic-book genre, drama’s been pretty neglected. Cue the marketing for Bollywood blockbuster 3 Idiots.
The game inverted the usual movie trick of sending the star on the road to do serious promotional work… by making him invisible. In fact, just prior to the release of 3 Idiots in December, the film’s lead, Aamir Khan – a major, major screen idol in his home country – disappeared completely.
But Khan left a note on the Idiot’s Academy website dedicated to the ARG, informing the prospective audience that he had embarked on a two-week tour of the country. “I will appear in seven places, will give you seven clues to find me,” he wrote, adding something about Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar by way of a tease.
And here’s the actor introducing the game.
Khan then set about making appearances in different regions in India. First port of call was Varanasi where he went around disguised as an old man. Later he popped up at a girls’ school in Gujarat.
And the movie’s marketers went out of the way to tease Big Media by freely offering up the actor for interview by local newspapers… and avoiding India’s leading outlets.
The idea of sending Khan on the road came from the problem that big Hindi films like 3 Idiots easily fill seats in the huge cities but don’t perform as well as regional films.
“We felt we aren’t connecting enough with our audience,” Khan tells Forbes.com. “So there’s a lot of business we aren’t reaching out to.”
And the metrics are impressive. In the last week of January, 3 Idiots was the country’s second-ranked film, according to BoxOffice India, and the market’s biggest grossing movie ever.
The marketing strategy makes sense, according to Sabine Stork, founding partner of market research firm Thinktank.
“I think most Western marketers are dimly aware of the vastness and diversity of India, but to me 3 Idiots brings home what this actually means in practice,” she says. “Even a film with a huge star like Aamir Khan and – as I heard myself from young consumers in Delhi a couple of weeks ago – with a message that strikes a real chord with a trendy youth audience can’t just rely on a monolithic above-the-line campaign.
“Incidentally, I hear that ‘Tollywood’ – the Telugu language film industry which predominates in Southern India – is already planning a local remake of 3
Idiots.”