Brief: 20th Century Fox International approached Beatwax to create a unique, standout global campaign for the origin film of the hugely successful ‘X Men franchise, X Men First Class.
Response: A unique X Men training academy was created on board the USS Intrepid: An US Navy aircraft carrier berthed in the Hudson River in New York.
A range of genuine mutant skills was taught to a select group of presenters, journalists and audience members of the media partners involved. The skills were those that the actual central characters used in preparation for the film:
Havoc: Can direct fearsome bolts of energy from his body. We used a Tesla Coil to connect X Men Recruits to 1 million volts of electricity to do the same!
Beast: His gymnastic and gravity defying feats are similar to those used by Free Runners and Parkour specialists. Our participants scaled the exterior of our ship from Quayside to flight deck using our special powers!
Banshee prepared for his role by using the USA’s largest vertical wind tunnel to create super hero flight. We did the same with our X Men recruits
Hollywood stuntmen helped our recruits recreate the fight scenes from the film
Great care was taken to give our experience a period Sixties feel, set against the film’s backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960’s. The USS Intrepid was chosen as host venue because it actually formed part of the US Naval blockade of the Russian fleet during the crisis.
16 international media partners were tied into the campaign to provide two huge swathes of publicity:
1: Deliver huge publicity drives across multiple platforms in broadcast, print and online, to find X Men recruits from partner audiences, who would participate in the event actually alongside a presenter or news anchor from each partner channel. We had to ensure our partners understood the concept; we did not want competition type mechanics buried in the back of their web pages for instance, they needed to spend at media or deliver free media collateral e.g. make trailers to drive interest and sign up; create on air features and insert them into prime time viewing schedules; leverage all of their digital databases to drive interest.
2. Each partner sent a broadcast crew to document the X Men First Class Academy experience of their presenter on board our aircraft carrier in New York. They made fly on the wall documentary type pieces for peak time broadcast back in their respective home markets, actually in the release weekend of the film in each territory. Genius!
Outcome £22 million (55 times the cost of project) of free media value delivered in 16 markets: This included the USA, India, South East Asia, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia and a host of smaller markets as diverse as Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, The Philippines and Holland
MTV made a 30-minute show about the experiences of their presenter at our event. This was shown in 83 markets globally.
Similar pieces appeared on Channel v (Phillippines), National Geographic (SE Asia).
Capital Radio in the UK made a live breakfast show broadcast actually on board our aircraft carrier; Saturday Morning breakfast presenter Dave Berry underwent X Men Training specially adapted to best suit radio broadcast
Top film blogger Joe Utichi was also invited to document his experience at the academy as the centre piece of an online campaign
Comments
for sharing!