Super Bowl Ads Analysis

Doritos Blaze and Mountain Dew Ice:

Techniques: Using renown celebrities for recognition. Peter Dinklage is an actor from Game of Thrones, a book adapted to a TV series popular among a wide age range, but mainly young adults in adults in their 40's. Morgan Freeman is universally popular among age ranges. There is also humor in the way the serious, professional actors are lip syncing famous rap songs. One rap song is from a recent artist, and the other from the early 2000's.
Target Audience: Mainly young adults to 40 year olds.

Tide:

Techniques: The commercial is for a laundry detergent, so they made parodies of multiple famous advertisements with the idea that if the clothes are clean, it is a tide commercial. This used humor/parody while also piggy-backing off of past ads that were well known. They also had an actor, Ron Pearlman, who is popular with a younger and young adult audience for his work in the Netflix series "Stranger Things".

Target Audience: Since humor is used, and the advertisements referenced were mostly internet famous, the target audience is young adults, i.e. millennials and Generation X. This would make sense, because young adults are just becoming independent- and in turn are doing their own laundry. By appealing to their sense of humor, they can get customers from these ads that may well end up using tide as their main detergent for a long time.

Old Spice had a well known advertising campaign, one of their most memorable advertisements was when their spokesperson was on a horse (ironically) embodying the ideal characteristics of "manliness". Tide's parody adds extra humor by inserting their own spokesperson onto the horse as well and giving it humorous body proportions. 

Tide also made fun of less humorous ads, and pointed at how commercials for products like cars and men's razors are so similar it can be hard to distinguish them. Again, they point out the actors have clean clothes and it is therefore a tide ad.

Another ad knon for its more shocking humor was a Mr. Clean advertisement. A woman is having a fantasy of the product's mascot, Mr. Clean, dance provocatively as he mops the floor. She snaps out of her daydream to realize it's her less attractive husband. Tide begins the ad the same, with the back of Mr. Clean facing the camera (likely to avoid showing his face and facing copyright issues), except when the woman snaps out of it, it is Tide's spokesperson.

Revision 1: Re-Casting Actors

We decided to change our actor the Victim to our friend Anna. She has been in a drama at her high school for four years and is the student leader of her drama department. Because of her availability and experience with acting, we thought she would improve the quality of our intro.

Mac was extremely helpful, as our actor for our Robber character (Evan) cancelled the night before filming. He was free and willing to help us finish re-filming. He ended up being much more capable of portraying the main character has super powers. He did all his own stunts.

The only set back to recasting was we had to re-film the entire sequence. We were, however, planning on doing so anyway due to lighting difficulties and we are happier with their performances.

Black Panther Advertising Campaign Research

When the trailer for Black Panther was released, Twitter exploded with positive response. Multiple hashtags about the movie spread, and many praising Marvel studios for handling the diversity of the movie well (research of African culture, a black director, etc.).

Due to its largely African American cast, many are excited for black representation in film- especially as leads in a hero action movie. Due to this factor, Black Panther has mobilized an unprecedented amount of grassroots marketing. Communities came together in events to discuss the movie and celebrate the new representation. One woman interviewed  by Variety pointed to her son when asked why the movie was so important. The fact that this movie will provide a role model African Americans young and old can identify with has excited people to promote the movie within in their own communities. The groups even collected donations to send 400 kids with the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem, NY to watch the movie.

The middle image shows a community gathering to celebrate the movie's release. On the right is a portion of the children who raised money to secure movie tickets.

Marvel also partnered with Hasbro to make a Black Panther themed toy line, including a light up mask and Panther claws.

Marvel Comics also ran a new line of Black Panther comics to help build the audience for the movie.

The movie has had multiple TV slots, including partnered advertising with Lexus and a spot in the Super Bowl. The studio released Kendrick Lamar's original soundtrack for the movie to increase the hype. Multiple short length ads on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook with promotional interviews with the actors and playful banter.

Marvel has heavily targeted their advertising towards the African American community because they are aware of the importance of representation and popularity the film has gained with its target audience.

Things to take away:
Marvel gained a lot of traction with communities thanks to the diversity and representation in its film- which gave it a strong grassroots campaign.
An original soundtrack is a nice feature for fans and can increase the release hype for the film.
By releasing multiple short ads with the actors and showing a charismatic, personable side of them makes the more relatable.

Wonder Woman Advertisement Campaign Research

Warner Bros. spent about $120 million on Wonder Woman's advertising budget. While some fans claim the movie did not receive equal coverage as other DC films- but in reality a more subtle campaign was enacted with a budget fairly equal to DC's other stand alone hero films. Unfortunately the movie also competed with the tail end popularity of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Social Media was a major part of the advertising campaign. Warner Bros. was one of the first companies to use the facebook camera mask as a part of their advertising. It is a filter that fits an augmented Wonder Woman tiara onto the user. Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman's actor) shared it on her facebook page and gained a sizable 8.5 million likes from fans.

 

Gal Gadot (left) in an advertisement for the filter and an example of a fan using the filter.

Warner Bros. also partnered with snapchat and created 5 filters with similar effects, entailing Wonder Woman's lasso of truth and even a 16 bit mini game.

Wonder Woman had an international TV spot on the TV show Super Girl.
There were multiple merchandise deals with companies like Lego, Dr.Pepper, and Coldstone Creamery. There was even a Nascar sponsorship.

One controversial means of advertising was promoting a dieting bar (ThinkThin). Audiences found it as inappropriate and a far cry from the message that women should not be forced to fit a stereotype.

Notes to take away:
Schedule our movie premiere date to avoid competition of other large studios with a popular basing. DC films struggle to gain traction because Marvel studios has set a high standard for comic book hero movies.
Another thing to take away would be to avoid controversial products to endorse. Many criticized DC films for promoting a diet bar when Wonder Woman was meant to break away from a stereotypical, harmful woman image.

The one word movie posters were meant to emphasize the strength, strong moral compass, and brave personality of Diana rather than profit from her beauty and slim figure.

Re-Filming for the Final Draft

On February 11, our group got together to refilm for our final draft.
We ended up refilming our entire scene, because Maya wanted to find a new actor for the Victim character. Our group also decided that the change of lighting (due to poorly timed filming during and after the sunset) was too distracting from the film.

Difficulties/Draw backs:
> The night before filming, our actor for the Robber character canceled. However, our last minute replacement was actually more effective in acting the scenes where we were trying to emphasize the protagonist's super strength.
> In order to fit all of our actors' schedules and for the sake of time, we had to film during  very crowded day. The daylight makes the robbery seem more out of place, but even behind the scenes we had trouble with blocking the walking traffic or having tourists ruin shots as they walked past. We even upset one store owner who saw us as a nuisance "blocking" her storefront (we made sure to keep a good distance from store entrances out of respect).
> We got a fair share of dirty looks from tourists who did not appreciate being on camera, so we made sure to cover the camera whenever we weren't filming to make it clear to others it was focused on the actors and not them.

Benefits:
> We were able to spend more time getting shots the way we wanted and perfecting how the lines were said or actions were done.
> We obtained a boom mic, and were able to record the actor's lines with clearer audio.
> Rebekah and Maya were able to handle the camera and boom mic more since there was more shots where Maya was acting.

Pictures from re-shooting: I took all the pictures, I was on the camera most of the time so when I was not I was taking pictures of the the rest of the group. Maya was acting for most of the shoot and Rebekah mainly operated the boom mic.

Identifying Our Film's Target Audience

Our film features a female super heroine in her late teens. The agent character is also a strong female lead. We are trying to increase diversity in action movies- especially independent films (i.e. a super hero not produced by a major company like Marvel or DC). This mean our target audience is teenage to young adult women. We also aim to attract men of that age group, since it is an action film, but primarily our focus will be on gaining the attention of a largely untapped market of woman looking to be represented in film.
Geographically, our audience will largely be in western countries (specifically the US and European countries with similar societies like England, France, etc.).
We will not focus on income level, as the movie doesn't represent income levels in detail. Same for education level.