Fred Claus : The Worst Film Ever

The marketing campaign for Warner Brothers' holiday film Fred Claus (2007) uses "new" marketing techniques. It like the innovative campaign for The Blair Witch Project (1999) uses reality-blurring advertising and viral marketing. Furthermore, like most recent commercial films, it uses what Henry Jenkins calls "transmedia promotion" in order to try and entice potential consumers (NMB 165). Unfortunately, despite these innovative techniques, the campaign is trite, untactful and crudely manipulative.

The reality-blurring advertising for The Blair Witch Project was a phenomenal moment in marketing history. It promoted the film in such a way that may people thought it was an actual documentary and not a fictional film and this, in effect, helped the film gross over US$248 million. The Fred Claus campaign also attempts to the blur the reality of children to make think it the film is a real. It does this with the "Elf Tour" were the elves from the film go on a mall tour taking photos and videos with children. The photos are then uploaded or the Internet at: http://www.zannel.com/user.htm?name=FredClaus-ElfTour. In some sense this is an interesting attempt at reality blurring adverting but unlike The Blair Witch Project or even the reality blurring adverting of American Psycho (2000) were the main character of the film sent out daily emails to people who signed up for the free mailing list - it seems rather hollow and trite. For is this anything more than just a large corporation with the money to burn creating a spectacle of small people?

The transmedia promotion tries dually to immerse the potential consumer in the world of the film and spread virally. The best of this transmedia promotion can be found on the official website for the film - www.fredclaus.warnerbros.com. The two most notable examples here are the games the Fred Claus Widget: The Sibling Rivalry Quiz and Sibling Sock'Em. Yet while these are the best attempts of the campaign at transmedia marketing they fail because the former is untactful and the latter is crudely manipulative.

The Fred Claus Widget: The Sibling Rivalry Quiz The sibling rivalry quiz collects data on users' feelings toward their siblings and then generates a three-sentence commentary on their relationship. The widget included with the quiz is intended to go viral by people embedding the quiz in their social network or website. The problem with this is that like the "Elf Tour" this widget is designed for younger audiences (presumably ages eight to fourteen). Yet, how many of these young children have social networks and websites? And, of the small minority who do, how many will know what a widget is and actually want to embed this seemingly worthless widget on their page?

The Sibling Sock'Em game is the most obvious failure of the campaign. The game is intended to viral but it does by trapping the user in, for a lack of a better phrase, a 'viral trap.' That is, it requires all users who want to play the game to enter their email addresses and moreover the email address of one of their siblings or close friends. The game, then, takes advantage of the desire of younger audiences to play the game by making them pay for it by providing email addresses. And to make matters worse, the game is about as functional as games found in typical flash banner ads. One can move forward, backward, and press the space bar to punch - nothing else.

What should we expect from commercial websites for films? I think it is in the interest of both the marketer and the consumer to be authentic. The reality blurring should have at least some creative twist that makes it worth talking and more than just a spectacle. The transmedia should actually be immersive indeed so impressive that I actually want to share it with my friends and sibling out of my own free will.