The soon to open Joe Carnahan movie "Smokin' Aces" is going beyond the traditional advertising methods to offer a couple of new online marketing ideas to see how they catch on.
The film which stars Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys and Jeremy Piven centers around a mob informer that is hunted by a number of hitmen.
One of the ideas is to offer Second Lifers a chance to play an action game that allows users to hunt each other down so that they have a chance to win a portion of the 1 million Linen dollars ($3,750) offered as a prize.
The strategy of Universal in Second Life is to give participants a taste of what the movie will be like on a deeper level by creating an experience like that of a video game. To that end they bought an island and created a virtual Nomad Hotel similar to the one that is a main feature of the movie. Visitors can sign up to be a hit man that hunts down others with a choice of weapons they can decide to use.
A second part of the campaign is one of running widgets that allows film fans to put the film's trailers on their blogs, MySpace or other social networking sites' profiles to spread the word.
The viral feature of the widget invites viewers of the preview to embed the widget on their sites as well. One interesting thing about the widget is that Universal can add other footage to it when they want and track where it is, how many have embedded it into their profiles or blogs, and how many visitors have watched it across those sites.
Clearspring Technology, the company that provided that widget, is also looking to add tools to it that will offer people a chance to see the times the movie will be shown and the ability to buy tickets right from the application itself. That would probably be a great tool and has some great potential in a lot of online marketing areas.
Finally, director Joe Carnahan has his own blog that you can visit and see what's happening with the movie. Overall it's a pretty good try and should give us some insights into the responses people will have and what they prefer.
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