Take the Lead plays with mash-ups.
(April 6, 2006) - There's an increasing trend in advertising: user created commercials, also known as mash-ups. One of the latest companies to try mash-ups is the company behind the movie Take the Lead. Starring Antonio Banderas and featuring a handful of Northern Stars, New Line Cinema is looking for alternative ways to market their movies beyond television and newspapers aand in the face of a slump in movie ticket sales, they hope hands-on, user-created commercials will help bring greater returns at the box office.

Take the Lead is a romantic drama about a professional dancer who volunteers to teach all the right moves to New York City schoolchildren. Shot in Toronto, the film is based on a true story. Banderas plays Pierre Dulaine, an inspirational Manhattan dance teacher and competitor, who volunteers his time to teach ballroom dancing to a diverse group of New York inner-city high school students serving detention. While initially skeptical, especially when they learn what he's there to teach them, they slowly take to his program and eventually take it one step further combining his classical dance with hip-hop to create a high-energy, unique fusion. The cast includes Canadian actors, Lyriq Bent, Marc Gagne, Jonathan Malen, Katya Virshilas and Lauren Collins.

But to extend the reach of the story to a generation that knows their way around computers, New Line is sponsoring such unusual marketing initiatives as a chance for computer users to create unofficial mash-ups, using material available on the film's official Web site (taketheleadmovie.com).

New Line is also providing blogs, online social communities and Web sites with mash-ups of music and images from "Take the Lead" produced by professional D.J.'s and V.J.'s. These are meant to supplement the official trailers for the movie being shown in theaters. Mash-up trailers can be watched at iFilm, MySpace, TagWorld and YouTube.

The goal of the campaign is to encourage consumers to become involved with the content. If it works, this just might be what the studios have been looking for to get some of the younger members of the movie-going public back into theaters.
In another example, Lionsgate, which is co-producer of Akeelah and the Bee, is working with Starbucks Coffee, sponsoring screenings for its employees and promoting the movie in stores with ads on cardboard coffee cup sleeves.

Clearly the ticket-buying public is in the driver's seat on this stuff and if these marketing efforts fail, the people behind the campaigns will have to look for even newer ways of getting a fickle public to part with their money. In the meantime for those who want to have fun messing with content and creating some neat stuff, this new participatory form of advertising holds some promise. That said, a similar campaign was recently tried by Chevrolet for its Tahoe SUV with mixed results. While the effort did get consumers to create ad content, many of the ads ended up being satirical and not very flattering toward the over-sized truck. It's one thing to give consumers some toys to play with, it may be quite another thing when they fashion those toys into weapons that help destroy your image.



Back To Top


Copyright © 2006.
northernstars.ca - all rights reserved.