Our agency, Zemoga, helped Paramount Pictures create a web app for the film Star Trek Into Darkness (with me leading the UI Design). After its success, the Hollywood giant decided to give us a chance to ideate digital solutions to promote their upcoming film, the sequel of the cult comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
My Role
I performed as a Creative/UI Lead in charge of visuals and overall concept direction. I also operated on my usual role as a Design Thinking facilitator on our ideation activities, aimed to develop solutions for the challenge at hand. I worked hand-in-hand with our Digital Strategist, that devised the communication and media strategy.
The Opportunity
After its release, Anchorman quickly became a cult classic. The film appeared in the theatres way before the first Advice Dog template was created (one of the first widely-adopted memes). Still, the internet culture widely and organically adopted the classic jokes from the movie, especially in the standard image macro format. It became kind of a big deal.
While many brands spend big money trying to buy the attention of the internet audiences, the Anchorman brand had an enormous amount of raw potential waiting to be ignited. However, as many brands have found out, users on the internet have become increasingly aware of dishonest attempts of shameless promotion at their expense. That is why it's essential to approach these "viral marketing" attempts with a dose of self-awareness.
The Approach
After our ideation process, it was clear for us and Paramount Pictures that we had to go with user-generated content and not try to force up "viral" stuns. If fans had built the brand's online presence, it made sense for them to continue with this organic process for the second installment of the series. We came up with the idea of a platform for users to upload video "auditions" for the fictional 24-hour news network featured on the new film. Of course, it was essential to include the official "Anchorman Meme Generator" that would consist of classic images and new ones evoking jokes from the new trailer.
We chose Tumblr as our platform to deploy the product for obvious reasons. It was the place where a big part of the fanbase was, and it allowed users to repost the content. We also had a presence on other social media sites like Facebook. However, at the moment the campaign was released, there wasn't another site that could better embrace the concept we were building, and at the same time, have a platform to do it as we could with Tumblr in terms of branding. Relying on Tumblr and other partners like Thismoment (they provide us with a tool to easily record auditions) allowed us to focus on what was important: The content.
The Challenges
Writing a script for Will Ferrell to act on our Call-To-Action video was a scary task, but it became a non-challenge. He can read the phone book and make it sound funny.
As a UX/UI designer, I had to work with the limitations of the Tumblr template. However, this challenge became bigger when we went into several rounds of design with our friends at Paramount Pictures, trying to find the right look and feel. We knew we wanted to evoke the 80's feeling of the film, but no solution seemed right on the spot.
In the end, we reached a satisfactory proposal, and even if I don't consider it a highlight of my visual work, it was an achievement because it served the solution in the right way.
The Solution
Here's what Anchorman's II Tumblr site looked like:
The Result
Anchorman II might not have been as successful or quotable as the first film (the Tomatometer might disagree with that, though), but the digital media campaign was a huge success.
After the launch of our site, Mr. Ferrell himself jumped to do an AMA on Reddit (way before Obama and Schwarzenegger made them popular for big celebrities), and he actually answered questions! This honest approach to the internet culture took us to the cover of Adweek and our CEO DJ Edgerton on the cameras of Bloomberg TV.