Canned vs. Planned Content: The Deadpool Success
Corporate culture on social media seems to just seep through screens, take over tweet after tweet, and creep into hashtags, Instagram comments, and, let’s be real, all of Google+. Although some creative companies can manage to stay floating precariously above the deep, dark waters of generic, unauthentic, irrelevant content, many organizations, especially those with smaller resource pools, get sucked into the depths of canned content. Movie culture and promotion is a little bit different with the big budgets and creative teams, but none the less falls into these patterns as well. Deadpool broke the mold and used planned content is a very creative and uncommon way across both social media and traditional media (which ultimately made it back to social media anyways). This successful use of planned content led to smashed box office records on it’s opening weekend in February 2016, as noted by the Forbes article, ‘Deadpool’: The Box Office Records It Broke (And Didn’t Break) On Its Insane Opening Weekend.
The Wired article, The Most Absurd Deadpool Marketing, From Tinder to Obscene Emoji, captures the essence of this corporate company’s marketing strategy, as it did truly range from Tinder accounts to using the poop emoji on billboards to Deadpool himself massaging Conan O’Brien. These marketing tactics and strategies were basically crafted with the remix culture in mind. It’s as if the marketing team created the plan with each item having a direct intent to be only shared and remade in even more ridiculous and hilarious ways. A great example of this — the emoji billboards.
Deadpool was able to use the movies style, that being a movie that is rated R, regularly breaks the 4th wall, and is a comedy, to their advantage in terms of promotion and marketing. The marketing team was able to create content to be a little edgier than with average movie promotion, use Deadpool himself as a way to gain traction and build an audience, and be humorous and sarcastic in their messaging. Essentially, the team was able to be unabashedly authentic and true to the movie and it’s characters, while adding the personal (or relatable) touch. For example, they were able to take advantage of untouched and personal platforms, like Tinder, which added a lot of relevance (to both the movie and society) and relatability for a very large audience.
Now, perhaps this outstanding social media and marketing strategy could only be successful because of the type of movie, but there is still something to be said for movie makers and marketing teams using the authentic angles of their films to personalize unique content that is intentional and relevant for engaged audiences.
The Deadpool marketing team used planned content on social media in a very specific way. They avoided generic, general and lazy content at all costs and specialized in carefully thought out, custom crafted and tailored-to-audience content. This unique way of using social and traditional media allowed the movie to seriously stand out and definitely catered to not only their strong box office opening weekend successes, but the continued understanding and value of the Deadpool brand.
My only remaining question: Did Ryan Reynolds get paid for his copious amounts of Deadpool tweets, or did he do those on his own accord? Because at this point, I can’t quite tell the two characters apart.
