Austin Traffic Camera Article

For Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, New Line went shag-a-deal-ic with a host of online promotions.

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Boasting the wacky antics of Saturday Night Live veteran Mike Myers, a psychedelic music score featuring songstress Madonna, and the bodacious curves of screen siren Heather Graham, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was by far one of the more anticipated sequels of this past summer.

But not the most.

The movie's offline marketing campaign set it up as the poor cousin to the behemoth Star Wars prequel Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and instead lured moviegoers by enticing them to see the underdog of the Hollywood Hits. (The offline undertaking played directly to the film's dinky character, actually valid potential viewers that if they could only see one movie, distributor New Line Cinema would imagine that Star Wars would have to be the one.) The everywhere online campaign utilized comparable self-deprecating humor, managing to walk the fine line between modesty and bravado and, New series maintains, worked hand-in-extremity with the off direction effort to help drive ticket sales to their current domestic level of more than $200 million.

Going in, the online marketing contrivance at New stripe was engaged with a brand whose character and reach had been established by a successful first film. While Episode I could rely heavily on its massive following of Star Wars fans who had been waiting eagerly for years for the prequel, to a lesser extent New profile could draw on Austin Powers: global Man of Mystery, the first Austin flick, which was released in May 1997. That film grossed $54 million in theaters; when it went to video it did even better, grossing $60 million. "There was a lot more sensibility of the belongings in the brandscape," says Gordon Paddison, New Line's governor of interactive marketing. "It previously had engaged a decent amount of mindshare."

The first movie was not without its online support. Paddison helped arrange about a half-dozen major tie-ins and about 100 other smaller promotions, in augmentation to a home site.

The new movie would approximately double those figures across the board, with more than a dozen extensive partnerships, 200 promotions and positive estate on the sites of several key sponsors to complement the home site. The promotional campaign for the second movie relied not only on the stigma's high recognition means, but also on the improvement of the Internet in general since 1997. "There's just more people online now," explains Paddison.

While the online support for the first movie was hefty, the second tide supporting Shagged worked more actively to drive society to theaters and confide more life into the increasingly strong Austin Powers onus.

SITE & STRATEGY

The character of Austin Powers is a '60s throwback, a parody that pays homage to James Bond and zany '60s TV shows like Laugh-In, among other pop culture artifacts. Whether he is sent back in time to his own swinging era or slugging it out in the conventional '90s, his clothes are psychedelic, his sayings drip with sexual reference, and his reason-to-be, baby, is to affair.

Users who land at , are immediately thrown into a '60s landscape complete with a swirling blue backdrop, rotating pictures of the characters in the movie, and a host of Austin-themed information and downloads linked to the myriad partnerships forged by New Line. (An archives section of the sequel's site likewise houses the first movie's site.)

"In Austin Powers, we did not go with the director in every category we tied into promotionally," says Bob Friedman, co-director of cosmic marketing and president of New queue Television. "We went with an airline that had a identity, if you will, sort of like Austin, which was Virgin [Atlantic Airways]. We went with a beer, which was Heineken. We did not go with McDonald's or with Burger King but instead went with with Bob's Big Boy. Everything from the partner that we chose to the missive that we developed was one that was in tier with the property"

Major tie-ins were planned along with a slew of fresh joint marketing efforts, one of the largest organism with online giant America Online. "We wanted our relationship with AOL to be all-encompassing," says Friedman. "Our relationship is designed to patronize our films [through all probable channels.]"

The goal was simple. Use the aggregate hordes of AOL members to spur interest in the film, recognizing that AOL may be the only online venue where New Line could acquire old-media style reach. "Don't underestimate the fact that when you have more than 18 million users, in the case of AOL, it can help you create a buzz," says Friedman.

Neil Davis, vice president of marketing and strategic development for AOL, felt the connection was a melding of personalities. "It's a community film," Davis explains. "Everyone was talking about it at the water cooler. And one of the things that we do best is nation."

The AOL combination also included AOL subsidiary Moviefone. New stripe sold tickets to advance screenings of Austin Powers exclusively to AOL members through Moviefone. Support could be found throughout the network in the form of banners and welcome screens, as well as physical estate on AOL Today, AOL Entertainment's main page, Movies category, and Feature extraordinary, on Digital City Entertainment, on and via a pop-up window to register friends.

The arrangement for Austin is just one part of a long-term deal between New profile and AOL in which the two companies collaborator on campaigns for New Line movies. "New direction was actually willing to take a risk," recalls Davis. The Austin Powers effort marked the largest and most far-flung film promotion to date within the AOL brotherhood, and Davis says the results sustain driven three to four fresh studios looking to promote online into talks with AOL. "It caused everyone to sit up," he says. "The dominoes are starting to fall."

A more unusual partnership came from across the pond with Virgin. "It started off as a straight commodity placement deal with some facile advertising to support it," says Sarah Buxton, director of marketing at Virgin. "But accordingly I figured that this thing could be as big as we wanted to make it ... and given that the brand fit was so perfect it made sense to actually blow it out on all levels."

Virgin wound up sponsoring New queue's live Cannes Cybercast of the Austin Powers party, and the airline is giving away free airline tickets as prizes on the Austin Powers Web point. Sweepstakes registrants can send an Austin Powers postcard refinement of San Francisco-based Egreetings to join the contest, which runs through the end of the year. Virgin hosted its own contest on opening day at co-branded site .com, allowing users to spin a virtual Big Ben niche contrivance to win one of 1,000 free tickets. It racked up 18 million hits during its 10-hour-long online game-a-thon. The first hour registered million hits-more than 500 hits per second.

Virgin moreover sponsored a zippy e-mail campaign from New York-based Togglethis, which developed a series of vital interactive games, sent via opt-in e-mail to desktops. Users sign up at any number of Internet administration outlets-including Yahoo!, Lycos, Togglethis, Microsoft maze, , AOL, or , in increment to the main site. Every week they obtain an attachment that when activated, causes the groovy sounds of Quincy Jones to reverberate from their PCs and Macs. An animated Austin may arise, maybe as a subject of a photo execute, in which case the cursor becomes a camera icon and users have to "click" on Austin to capture him on film. Sometimes Dr. Evil squeaks across the screen in his wheelchair and fires at the screen. Some episodes even featured a caricature of Virgin founder Richard Branson riding on top of a London-bound plane.

"A lot of what we are exacting to do-and a lot of what New Line is exacting to do-is create a relationship with the customer," says Marc Singer, co-founder and senior vice president of programming for Togglethis. "What we wanted to prove with Austin Powers is that you can drive consumers to action. This is not just marketing, it's e-commerce." Users can click through the Togglethis episodes to be directed to , which in turn offers them theaters, times and online ticket sales via Moviefone.

New Line worked nearly with the Loews Theatres chain online to drive moviegoers into cinema seats. "We try to coerce a correspondence between this piece of the institution and cyberspace," says Pam Henning, governor of strategic and interactive marketing for New York-based Loews Cineplex Entertainment. An online coupon improvement was conducted in 400 theaters nationwide. Visitors to the Loews habitat received coupons for a free Austin Powers mini-poster and inaugurate magazine CD-ROM. The location was again "Austin Powerized," as Henning calls it, to include vibrant '60s-influenced Austin images, so people logging on to find theater times could be swayed to see the new Austin Powers movie.

New stripe struck two technology-driven partnerships with Macromedia and NeoPlanet. Macromedia sponsored a Shockwave game supported with a $1 million print ad campaign to help spawn awareness of Macromedia Director developer software. The aim of the "Move Your Mojo" game is to make the character dance, which generates mojo. When the mojo meter is filled, users win the game. NeoPlanet created two free downloadable "skins"-wallpaper, if you will, to bear boring Web browser interfaces more fun. One skin featured the main man Austin, and the fresh, his arch nemesis Dr. Evil. Users can customize their browsers with images and sounds from the movie. San Francisco agency Lot 21 designed the skins.

The partnerships proved to be as much of a blessing for the companies that got involved as they were to New Line. "Austin Powers is one of those properties that could likewise help our promotional partners in reservation of an image and an attitude," says Friedman.

"The Austin Powers game, created in Director 7 Shockwave Internet Studio, was highlighted in Macromedia's ad campaign to show what could be done with the software," explains Jana Ziegler Hildebrand, governor, Shockwave marketing manager for San Francisco-based Macromedia. "Users walk away with a actually immersive experience." After its exclusive debut at , the game is now also available on Macrome-dia spin-off scene and, according to Hildebrand, is currently the most extremely trafficked game on that location.

Drew Cohen, CEO of NeoPlanet, feels that the partnership with New direction allows NeoPlanet to actually flex its creative muscles and show what the visitor's branding efforts can perform. "It broke down the barriers of understanding what the technology was," says Cohen. "It wasn't about just technology anymore. forthwith it was fun."

Even the bigger companies enjoyed the attention. "Strategically, I wanted to do something to jump-start our obligation to online media as we had previously been a bit behind the game," says Virgin's Buxton.

"From a decent marketing brand familiarity standpoint, we've increased our unaided brand consciousness against our core target markets by an average of about 20 percent across the board [constant by an annual awareness tracking study Virgin does across all its markets]. That is just vast over such a short conclusion," says Buxton.

Many of the smaller tie-ins were fluent to put in place, as the sites had worked with New Line on fresh properties. New Line likewise wanted to partner with companies new to them to develop future working relationships. "We really did try to tie in with some of the folks who we may need in house another kind of a name," says Friedman. "Here, we were providing some help as well to their brands, and we wanted to go be efficient to go back to them when we had another brand that made more sense." Other partners included: ; Mr. Showbiz; ; ; ; MSN diversion; Yahoo!; TNT's Roughcut; E! Online; Compuserve; ; Screenzone's mall kiosks; and Tower Records.

RESULTS

"Austin Powers surely has been more moneymaking than anything else I've exhausted, and I'd say a lot of that is because the brand translates very well to the Web," says Paddison, which he characterizes as "harmlessly un-PC." The brand's strength relied, throughout all the creative, on self-deprecating temperament, which kept the campaign from getting too big for its britches.

Adds Friedman: "We easily had to be everywhere, but we had to be everywhere with an perspective that was in line with this underdog philosophy. And that's tough."