Academy Awards, Avatar or Hurt Locker? Avatar wins with McDonalds' Marketing Promotion

I'm looking forward to tomorrow night's 82nd Academy Awards ceremony. There appears to be a quite a bit of hype around whether we will see the first woman director, Kathryn Bigelow for the Hurt Locker, take home this year's Best Director Oscar. Now I have to admit that I don't often see many movies while they're in the theater. I like to wait to see most of them on DVD at home. However, my husband and I did go to see Avatar because we thought the large screen would be the way to see this film and we enjoyed it very much. In fact, I think I liked Avatar even more than he did.

So whether you're pulling for Avatar and James Cameron or the Hurt Locker and Kathryn Bigelow, Avatar by far had the biggest interactive promotional marketing campaign of all the films up for Best Picture Oscar. McDonald's got on board with Avatar and pushed the creative limits with a augmented reality game that let players explore the movie's computer-generated planet Pandora with a set of on-package cards.

While the campaign took different forms around the world in order to integrate with different menu items, the U.S. marketing effort centered on McDonald's Big Mac. McDonald's U.S. chief marketing officer Neal Golden said "The Big Mac is all about the thrill of your senses, that's why the company decided to link it to the Big Mac in North America." So from December 18 through January 7, U.S. customers who bought a Big Mac also got packaging that included one of 8 different Avatar "Thrill Cards" attached.

The game, called PandoraQuest, was accessed on McDonald's local Web site around the word. It tasked players with such goals as finding hidden objects within three different Pandoran landscapes. If players retrieved all objects, they advanced deeper into Pandora and reached their goal of becoming a member of the "RDA Research Team" as in the movie. U.S. players who scavenged successfully gott more than just the honor of joining the team: They also got to unlock bonus features in the form of scenes from the movie.

Players could also use an online version of a PandoraROVR, a transport vehicle seen in the film, to explore the planet on the Web, capturing and sharing images with others. Participants held up the cards to a Web cam and used McD Vision augmented reality software to interact with the jungle landscapes generated for the movie.

McDonald's also ran a social media campaign on Twitter which asked followers to be the first 10 to decode daily word scrambles. The grand prize was a private screening of Avatar along with a Big Mac lunch with producer Jon Landau.

Now this month PMA is holding their 27th annual Reggie Awards which are the highest honor in integrated marketing. The McDonald's Avatar campaign is one of the finalists in three categories:

• Age-Specific Marketing
• Digital Marketing
• International/Global Marketing

Gold, Silver and Bronze winners, including the SUPER REGGIE, will be announced during the REGGIE Gala Awards dinner, part of the PMA's Annual Integrated Marketing Conference, BLUR, taking place at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago on March 24th. I will be there as PMA's "Official Blogger" so will report on who wins the top awards. If it is McDonald's Avatar campaign, I should have some real results to report on. So, please check back soon.

In the meantime, if you watch the Academy Awards ceremony, let us know if you were for or against the academy's decision.

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