entertainment

Glowing: Focus Pushes '9' With Newspaper Rack Cards

9 Looking to ape the fantastical look of its new animated movie "9," Focus Features is employing a new tactic that uses glow-in-the dark newspaper rack cards to draw attention and awareness to the film.

Hoping to draw a Latino audience, Focus has placed the cards in 11,000 newspaper racks of Los Angeles' largest Hispanic newspaper, La Opinion. The cards use a material that charges when exposed to daylight and will glow for 10 hours every night, illuminating the movie's title numeral.

"There was no outdoor planned for this campaign," Elizabeth Barrutia, founder and president of BARU advertising (which created the campaign) says. "The film is so visual, we wanted to make sure the Latino community was exposed to its artistic elements."

Though the rack cards are part of a Latino-focused effort, which also promotes a sweepstakes in which a La Opinion reader can win a $200 gift card to Best Buy and a collection of Focus Feature DVDs), the glow-in-the-dark element carries the added benefit of appealing to the general market, too. "We're not limited to the readers of La Opinion; we can be seen by the general public," Barrutia says.

advertisement

advertisement

The campaign is the first to use the glow-in-the-dark material for a newspaper rack effort in Los Angeles, and likely the country. It couldn't be immediately confirmed if it had been employed elsewhere.

The movie, which opened nationally Wednesday, is an animated fantasy of creatures living in a post-apocalyptic world where all humans have disappeared. The main character, whose name is 9, helps a group of others like him (they look like human sock puppets) discover why fearsome machines want to destroy them.

Next story loading loading..