• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, May 25, 2006

In the simpler days of yore, movie studios rarely broke a sweat to ensure awareness of their mega-blockbusters. They'd merely badger Entertainment Weekly into a cover story, buy up most of the commercial real estate during NBC's must-see Thursday shows, and let nature run its ugly course.

In the wake of New Line's campaign around the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, however, studios have found themselves confronted with a demanding new audience: fans eager to inhale every morsel of pre-release info. So where they once might have been treated to a sanitized Q&A with "Nacho Libre" star Jack Black, they now get an education in the hallowed tradition of Mexican wrestling ("lucha libre"). Where "Mission: Impossible 111" would once have been touted with Tom Cruise hitting the talk-show circuit and smiling a lot, the film's promotional campaign instead consisted of  um, trying to convince the public that its star is neither brainwashed nor terminally loopy. (Fine, bad example.)

Fans started buzzing in 2004 when news of Warner Bros.' plans for "Superman Returns" leaked out. The anticipation intensified in the face of a proposed $180 million budget and participation by "X-Men" director Bryan Singer.

What's followed in the past two years has been, even by the spare-no-expense standards of Hollywood studios, a marketing juggernaut. Partners, ranging from Pepsi-Cola and Burger King to Duracell and Quaker State, lined up from the get-go. But with 30 days to go until the film's June 30 release, Warner Bros. has not only managed to please its core constituencies, but also largely avoided the marketing fatigue often associated with blockbuster properties.

According to Don Buckley, senior vice president, interactive marketing, the seeds for the "Superman Returns" marketing program were planted back in late 2004. Knowing the near-pathological interest among the property's hard-core fans, Warner Bros. tapped Singer for a series of video production journals. They debuted on fan site BlueTights.net and were made available via SupermanReturns.com and iTunes.

"If there have been mistakes made in the past with genre or comic-book kinds of films, by us or anyone else, it was probably a failure to respect the core fan group," Buckley notes. "That can have a devastating effect on word-of-mouth."

At press time, Warner Bros. had notched 39 million downloads of the video journals via iTunes alone. "We were very skeptical when we started seeing the numbers come in, but they're accurate," Buckley says.

BlueTights.net founder Justin Korthof, who saw site traffic surge from 40 hits a day to around 400,000 per month after the debut of the journals, lauds Buckley and his team for the relative soft sell. "What they did right was let the fanfare build itself," he notes. "Nobody tried to explain to us how excited we should be."

"The people who 'get it,' so to speak, are the ones who take sound marketing principles and apply them to the online medium," Buckley adds. "You adapt to the technology and you use it in the most efficient way. It's not rocket science."