Giving away your marketing budget isn’t most people’s idea of getting value for money. However, a terrifying horror film is the focus of an unusual and unprecedented marketing approach which is doing just that. Local film promoter Ant Timpson (famous Filmhead behind such sensations as 48Hours and the Incredibly Strange Film Festival) will be giving away the marketing budget of [REC] 2, the sequel to last years acclaimed horror hit [REC].

Timpson explains: “Vendetta had a few thousand [dollars] to release the film, which basically meant a couple of newspaper ads and a tiny radio campaign. With that spend on traditional media, you’d be lucky to even alert the film’s core fanbase. I suggested we simply giveaway the marketing budget as a prize to whoever creates the most “buzz” about the film’s upcoming November 13th release. Instead of using static old media, I thought it’d be fun to see some innovative creative people (designers, media students, film fans, show-offs) think outside the box and raise awareness for the film in surprising and entertaining ways online and offline. We’ve also made all the marketing materials available for anyone to download and use. At present my bad photoshop of the John Key as a zombie is in the lead to win $5000 cash. It’d be a sad indictment on NZ’s creative contingent if that won!”

This is a great example of finding truly creative ways to market your art. The competition has already created it’s own ‘buzz’, not to mention a lot of free publicity, and Timpson has inspired a whole bunch of people to do his marketing for him.  And this approach really focuses on viral, word-of-mouth marketing, which we know is hugely influential. I imagine he’ll get much more than his money’s worth out of this campaign!

The unusual competition runs for four weeks and is open to everyone. More information and some background can be found at the website. Twitterers can alert people to their work by tagging tweets with #rec2nz.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 8:53 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.