Sherlock Holmes and the mysterious case of the marketing campaign

I wish the timing had worked out that we could have studied this film for our group project, because I really do think its campaign was brilliant. It was enough to get me hooked months before it came out, and to get people to go.

The first thing I remember seeing was the fair amount of publicity announcing that Guy Richie was to direct a Sherlock Holmes movie. People were in uproar (or at least, mildly annoyed) because of his previous films and the perception that he would never be true to the books. However, even bad publicity is publicity, and it caught my attention.

Next was the very early trailer, which said very little about the plot, but which threw a lot of stuff at the screen:



I was given a link to it, so I don't know how knowledge of its existence was announced, but word of mouth (and word of... type...) spread it. It really made me want to see it, even though I knew it wouldn't be out for months. Its interesting to see bits which were obviously meant to go into the film but which were cut, ie: Rachel McAdams in a corset. DVD extras, anyone?

In the following months, there were a number of interviews with the cast and crew which circulated around the internet press, maintaining interest, and stills and posters were released. A second trailer was released in the summer, and I remember poring over it with a dozen theatre students gathered around a computer:



The design was character and actor based, so that fans of Holmes and Watson would be interested, and fans of robert Downey Jr and Jude Law as well. It made the film look glamorous and shiny in the way Hollywood does best. It feels like the standees have been in Cineworld for ages, and I'm pretty sure they arrived in November - yet more lead-in time to get people excited; I know that we would often stand in the lobby after getting our tickets just gazing...

I would drool over the compositition and the use of slab-serif fonts and the textures but that's just me slipping into graphic designer mode. (Although really, look at those slab serifs!)

In December, things got aggressive. The third trailer arrived, with more to it and continuing in the partnership vein of the posters:



I first saw it before 2012, (there was squealing involved) which I'm sure reached a lot of cinema-goers. Posters were everywhere, and you couldn't move for tie-ins. The Baker St underground was covered in tiny posters (which is clever and funny, and exactly the kind of thing I love):

Ads were carried on YouTube, on MSN today; the Guardian promoted an audio tour of Holmes' London; Madame Toussaud's "developed a Robert Downey Jnr as Sherlock Holmes experience" (via: http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk). And then there was the Facebook tie in.

Called 221B, you visited this website, logged into your Facebook account and you got to be Sherlock Holmes. I'm not going to lie, I played it, and it would be a brilliant, brilliant piece of advertising if it didn't have one major flaw. The point is that you can choose one of your friends to be the other character, and then you can collaborate on sharing evidence etc; this was perfect for me, since I do have a perfect friend for such a purpose. She is someone upon whom I can thoroughly rely, the Watson to my Holmes (some of you have seen the picture), she's as much of a fan as I am (she's cameoed on this blog before as "a random vet" during Robert Downey Jr night), and what did 221B do? It wouldn't let me pick her. I don't know what glitch in the system this is, but it was bitterly disappointing, not to mention depressing to play by myself. So, good game, but an insurmountable problem.

(Incidentally, my favourite example of this kind of tie-in is the Dalek Game from back in 2005, I got embarrassingly good at that.)

All this effort yielded results: so far it has taken $230,729,320 worldwide, and it is still to be released in many countries. This is especially promising considering that the competition was Avatar, the film widely billed as the film you have to go and see, and which millions of people did. As a comparison, Guy Richie's last film, Rock'n'Rolla, took $5,700,626 during its whole release, and his previous highest grossing film (Snatch) took $30,328,156.

We can't just go around measuring success as money though. One mark in its favour is that there is already talk of a sequel; some people criticised the film for actually just being a set-up for a continuation, but while the opportunity is doubtless there, had this flopped we would not be hearing about possibly-maybe casting spoilers and this woman wouldn't be getting into a fuss over Robert Downey Jr on Letterman. (Even though she has no legitimate claim.)

Critically, it's somewhat mixed: The Guardian's Catherine Shoard hates it (despite liking Guy Ritchie), Mark Kermode likes is (despite hating him), Wendy Ide of The Times is enthusiastic (if fixated on the relationship between the detective and the doctor); the users of IMDB give it 7/10 stars and Rotten Tomatoes gives it an average of 6.1/10. As far as word of mouth goes, I tend to be the one doing the proselytizing, so I really wouldn't know. 



Next in the series: Watchmen! (Possibly. Its internet campaign was very interesting, as was the push on the graphic novel.)