The long awaited Steven Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is finally coming to theaters this week, starting on May 22nd to be exact. Paramount Pictures is bringing back Harrison Ford in this iconic role along with Karen Allen and adding a new, younger star to the cast, Shia LaBeouf, and also the very talented Cate Blanchett. This movie is bound to attract a extremely diverse audience...male, female, older, younger, adventurer, romanticist, you name it. With this much excitement around a new theatrical movie release it was bound to attract many marketing partners, one big one being Major League Baseball.
Official MLB team sites have in the past been a great venue for entertainment marketers who want to promote a new sports-related movie release. However, this new Indiana Jones movie is among the few non-sports film related campaigns seen on MLB.com and its 30 team sites which launched at the begging of May. When baseball fans check their favorite team's schedules during this month of May they not only get the schedule but also find an image of Harrison Ford in his signature Indiana Jones attire on the May 22nd calendar date.
"This is the first time we've had creative in the schedule section," said Jason Klein, MLB.com's VP corporate partnerships for the Western region, adding, "It kind of jumps out at you. It seemed like such a perfect fit because people are constantly checking the schedule." He added that teams prefer to have game schedule links limited to ticket sales pages.
So I went to my favorite team's website, the Boston Red Sox, and clicked on the schedule and here's part of what I saw for this month. There's also this image off the left side of the calendar that links me to the official Indiana Jones website.
Display ads for the Living Legends Sweepstakes appear across MLB sites. Visitors to the MLB Sweepstakes page can view a trailer of the film and enter the name of their favorite active major leaguer for a chance to win a trip to see him on the field, along with tickets to see the Indiana Jones movie. MLB "wanted to focus on the legend of Indiana Jones," explained Klein. MLB.com will promote the sweepstakes through e-newsletters to their database and editorial coverage. The campaign runs through May 25.
Sweepstakes promotions are one of the most popular formats for advertisers on MLB sites. Again most marketers' objective with a sweepstakes is to collect consumers' contact information in order to send them future information via email on product offerings and promotions. In this case Paramount and MLB will share the database. Klein looks forward to launching similar campaigns on behalf of other non-sports related flicks. "We hope to do this with other studios," he said.
Back to the movie's official website, it is packed with information, videos, downloads and ways to order tickets. I've downloaded their widget which I've embedded at the end of this post. There's also links to the movie's MySpace and Facebook pages. There's a list of their other partners which include Burger King, Dr. Pepper, M&M's, Snickers, Expedia, Kellogg's, Harley Davidson, Blackberry Peal and Lunchables. Quite an impressive list and I'm sure that each of these brands are doing their own interactive promotion, but I can't cover each of them all here. Perhaps I'll try and write about a couple in another post.
I just hope the movie actually lives up to it's expectations, which are so very high. It will introduce the adventures of Indiana Jones to a whole new generation. Paramount already has a huge hit with it's first major summer release, IronMan which I wrote about here. Let''s see if Indiana Jones will be as big or bigger. If you go see it during opening weekend, please let us know what you think.
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