Movie launch rewrites the creative rule book on retail promotional tie-ins

With the opening of the 7 years in the making Simpsons movie (release date in the US is 27th July) the creative types working with the Simpson brand have taken an experiential concept, in this case pop-ups, and cleverly applied it to maximum effect.

Twelve 7-eleven stores across America have been converted to operate as rebranded kwik e stores for the duration of the movie release build up. In a wonderful example of life imitating art, the cartoon world store chain not only exists in our real world, but is also stocked with the brands the show’s creators invented to overcome product placement issues. So the Simpsons’ variety of coke, Buzz Cola, is stacked up and is flying out of the stores.Even the perennial 7-eleven staple, the hot dog, has seen increases of up to 4 times the volume of sales.

And of course what Simpsons experience would not be complete without the Homer-validated doughnut, the Burbank California store having seen sales close to 60,000 already in the month of July.Pop-ups have been a brand medium that had value to specialist tie-ins of product launches (as we learned through our experience with the pop-up exposure for Motorola’s Q launch) but it has taken a cast of cartoon characters to expose the American public as to why pop-ups are valuable to them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Mania - Passion manifested. 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.