If you haven’t seen any of the Deadpool marketing campaign on your screens yet, then you clearly haven’t been using much social media this year. From the character appearing on dating app Tinder to YouTube’s ’12 days of Deadpool’ and posting on social media sites Facebook & Instagram almost everyday, the guerrilla marketing tactic proved to be a huge success for the movie, nearly doubling expectations the studio had for opening weekend profits and as of 15th March reaching over 700 million dollars worldwide at the box office.
The Deadpool marketing team used social media unlike any other movie had and showed the business world how effective social media can be. Surprisingly the most effective parts of the campaign were completely inexpensive. Regional videos were made for a number of countries outside United States which aligned with the use of holiday marketing on events like Australia day, Christmas, Valentines day and the most successful 12 days of Deadpool event. All these videos were released on sites like YouTube and Facebook which was cost effective, but still received millions of hits. Actor Ryan Reynolds who stars as the character also transformed his Twitter into a tool for driving the movie to his all his followers. Not to mention all the publicity stunts on talk shows & his cult fan base. Deadpool went viral over all social media.
The lesson that can be learnt from the success of Deadpool is to utilise social media! According to sensis report on social media, the larger the size of the business, the more likely they are to have a strategic social media plan to push their product. Still with only 63% of large businesses following a strategic plan, there so much more that the big brands could be doing to connect with their audiences on social media!
With Deadpool proving that a successful marketing campaign can be carried out with costing the earth, what Deadpool really had over the all the competitors was originality and a sense of authenticity. The target market truly connected with the icon and became passionate about the product, sharing it on their own social medias and recommending it to friends. Big brands need to bring these key aspects into the game of social media if they want to compete in the ever changing market.
Ref:
http://adage.com/article/media/inside-deadpool-s-top-marketing-strategy/302696/
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/07/deadpools-secret-weapon-a-viral-social-media-campaign.html
on-screen marketing 
Hey Dave! I think what you said about Deadpool was pretty interesting and relevant and attention catching. You’re completely correct about the movie’s success from their guerrilla marketing tactics outside of conventional marketing methods. For me anyway, I had no idea about the movie or what it was about, but I just heard about all the hype over social media, such as facebook, instagram, reddit, youtube ect. Which then led me to actually going to see the movie (which I really liked).
But I’m just wondering, do you think that other movies would be able to claim the same success as deadpool with the same strategies? since movies such as Zoolander 2 came out at the same time and didn’t do nearly as well, although I did see them using social media advertising and conventional methods also.
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Hi Mikael! Thanks for the positive feedback, I appreciate it! It’s great to hear that you really liked the movie and even better found out about the character from social media.
In regards to if the same strategy would work with other movies. I think it really depends on how the the movie is being marketed. Deadpool got to be witty and evoke humor centered around the one character. It was also very fresh and did something that other movies hadn’t done. For Zoolander 2 they hoped to build nostalgia from the first movie with basic marketing tactics. I did see some examples with Ben Stiller on The Project and climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge as a publicity stunt posing as Derek Zoolander but it wasn’t enough to really capture people’s attention or make they go wow I want to see this. I think the movie (product) itself has to be of higher quality if they want the marketing to work better. Thanks for the thought!
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Hey Dave!
The picture of Deadpool really caught my attention on twitter, which bought me to your blogpost.
I agree with you that the Deadpool marketing team has used social media unlike the other movies. I actually myself watched all of them because of the humorous jokes that Ryan Reynolds makes as Deadpool and I think that is what draws so many viewers to watch it (I watched the movie straight away after it came out!).
I think what really made this movie such a huge success was that it aimed its videos at so many different countries and like you said, the videos are aligned with the countries holidays or events (Do you think the viewers might feel more connected on a personal level?), and they continuously advertised their movie consistently until the movie was released.
Also to add to what Mikael said about Zoolander 2, about their social media marketing, do you think they weren’t as successful as Deadpool because it wasn’t a movie that captured the audiences attention because most of the attention was on Deadpool at the time? And if it were to be released somewhat later, it might of had a different outcome for Zoolander 2? (Because I know they even had a snapchat story for their Zoolander 2 premiere).
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