How Deadpool slayed their Digital Marketing plan

Seen Deadpool yet? I did, last weekend.

Confession time, I am a bit of a Marvel Universe nerd, just a little one - but I have 2 teenage boys who love both the DC and Marvel universes (as to who is better, well I will leave that for another day)

Did I say I also am a bit of a fan of Ryan Reynolds?

Meme Generator

And of course marketing, more specifically Content Marketing in the Digital Space.

So anyway, back to Deadpool.

Apart from the fact that the film itself is a riotous piece of fun from start to finish, what I really liked about the film was the process of telling me about it.

I was engaged in the story well before I even started to watch the story.

I have blogged before about telling our story, about how effective content marketing is really about telling our brand story in a way that engages and resonates with our intended audience.
 
Well the Deadpool team really did nail this when they put together their Digital Strategy for marketing this film.

They knew their audience. If they had utilised my customer persona worksheet (or in fact anyone’s customer persona worksheet) one of their customer personas would have looked like my eldest son - they could have used his uni student card ID as the avatar. So after the mistakes of X-men Origins and DeEADPOOL not looking or sounding anything like fans’ expectations, they were focussed on making sure that their intended audience understood that this DEADPOOL would exactly meet and match their expectations.

As a consequence of understanding who their audience really was (and they had a few customer personas, not just 18-20 year old boys - although that would be a huge one) their content was tailored to appear in channels and to use language that resonated with their audience fully.

And yes, it was a tad on the NSFW side.

They engaged with their audience in all of their favourite places.

YouTube was used extensively, with Ryan Reynolds in character, piggy backing on various events to set the scene for the worldwide launch of the film. He popped up on our screens to celebrate Australia Day, we watch the 12 days of Deadpool and of course in the SuperBowl ad lineup.

Memes were used to great effect and extensively on Social Media. They clearly had fun with telling their brand story in this manner. And knowing their audience so well, knew that this kind of material would be very shareable.

Yahoo Movies

Essentially they started a conversation well in advance of the movie. They just opened up a conversation about their brand, the story and dropping the character into environments and scenarios that were both topical and typical of a movie of this kind.

So yes, maybe we can’t all utilise the video production values of the Deadpool team.

Maybe we can’t nab a brand influencer of the calibre of Ryan Reynolds (although Ryan are you reading this? I would love to talk to you about my 6 Weeks to the Summit program) but we can open up conversation with our customers at any time.

Customers - know them, name them, talk to them!

And just because I can’t resist, here is yet another example of Deadpool having a conversation with us, used to great effect in the lead up to the movie launch - a breast examination promo - yes really!

Enjoy!