Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time but here’s a question:
Can you tell me the main character’s name?
And his Na'vi girlfriend?
I’m not saying none of you will know.
Getting “Jake Sully” and “Neytiri” doesn’t make you some kind of superfan.
But for all that financial success, you’d expect the movie to have made more of a lasting
impression on our culture.
Like, I know that the Princess from Frozen is called Elsa.
She’s on lunchboxes, she’s a halloween costume, she’s on magazines.
Just like Luke Skywalker still is and Captain Jack Sparrow.
Like Avatar, none of these came from popular books or comics but they all stuck; for some
reason Avatar hasn’t.
You have to assume that the movie itself just doesn’t have the impact of these other giant
blockbusters.
Looking only at money that those other franchises made you would guess that Avatar would be
everywhere and it's not.
Today we’re going to look at what other factors made Avatar the biggest commercial
hit in the history of the silver screen.
The digital marketing campaign for Avatar was multi-layered and the biggest driving
force behind the success of the movie.
They knew from the start that the thing audiences would be excited about was this world that
they had created.
The story is nothing particularly original, it’s basically a retelling of Pocahontas
or Dances With Wolves and other similar ideas, but they geography and wildlife of Pandora
is what breathed life into the film.
The website had the usual trailers and photos but it went much further with wallpaper downloads,
music, bios of the characters and scientific tours of the planet.
There was also an interactive trailer that allowed you to click on characters and objects
to access more information.
They involved the blogging community and even had Pandorapedia to add to the rich detail
about this planet.
There was a wide augmented reality campaign too.
Despite this being one of the first major 3D movies, the studio were careful not to
sell it hard on this aspect.
Instead, by partnering up with Coke Zero and McDonalds, they gave people access to digital
worlds through various scannable codes on the product.
All of these marketing tactics sound textbox today for launching a major film, but Pandora
pioneered a lot of them.
With McDonald’s, the localised McDonald’s websites had a game called Pandora Quest.
They did a similar thing with toy company Mattel, where creatures on cards in their
hand would become a living digital creature that they could anywhere on the screen.
These huge brand tie ins were where most of the marketing success came from, and what
a lot of the estimated $200 million budget was spent on.
You don’t get much bigger exposure than with Coke and McDonalds so it was clearly
worth it.
This was all supported by plenty of social media chatter, a lot of which was organic
but they also had some clever tactics like a “Tweet to listen” promo for access to
the music on Twitter.
So, why did this campaign work so well?
Because it built excitement about the movie without revealing too much about the plot
and, more importantly, just how impressive the visuals were.
If they had gone all out on promoting the visual impact that James Cameron had been
working for years on, then people would go in with only that in mind.
Instead, there was a sense that a very well realised alien world had been created but
audiences were still shocked at how beautiful the film was.
This is what gave it phenomenal stamina at the box office.
It wouldn’t have worked with one of the big franchises like Star Wars because this
is the kind of thing we expect from them.
But Avatar had the benefit of being an unknown quantity.
After an opening weekend of $77 million, it dropped just 1.8% by the next one, and still
only 9.4% by the third weekend.
On the 7th weekend, they took $31 million.
They still hold the record for every weekend from 3rd to 7th.
Cameron’s other blockbuster giant, Titanic, takes most of the records for the weekends
after that.
To give you some comparison, the first Avengers movie opened at $207 million but it dropped
50% then 46% then 34% as the weekends continued.
By weekend 7 it was at $11 million.
And those numbers are amazing, by the way, it’s just that Avatar’s were insane.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens was similar, opening big at $248 million but dropping by
around 40% each week.
An interesting question on Avatar though is; how big of a factor was the 3D?
The price of a ticket was up to double that of a normal movie, typically selling for $15.
There’s no doubt that this brought them a huge amount of extra revenue but if you
remove that factor, it’s only Titanic that would take the top spot for biggest gross
worldwide.
If you halved its worldwide gross of 2.7 billion, to give you 2D ticket prices, it would still
be the 8th biggest film ever.
But all the others, except Titanic, had a 3D release too, so it’s irrelevant.
However, it wasn’t just the ticket price, it was also the novelty factor of 3D that
attracted some people, especially when combined with such a big, fully realised world.
3D had mostly been tied up with IMAX since the turn of the millennium, after its popularity
in the 50s had faded.
It was actually James Cameron who made the first full length IMAX 3D feature: Ghosts
of the Abyss.
It was a documentary about the sunken wreckage of the Titanic.
But, for many audience members, Avatar was their first experience of modern 3D and when
you're there, racing on a flying lizard between floating mountains, it’s pretty impressive.
We can’t get any numbers for it but it’s said that Avatar got a huge amount of repeat
audience, people who went to see it more than once.
At the end of the day, the Avatar marketing team did what all great product launches do;
they got plenty of exposure, generated a wide interest but still let the product speak for
itself.
With the sequels being shot as we speak, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to pull of another
campaign like this one so it will be interesting to see how they go about it.
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