Could the '90s Movie Marketing Ideas Work When Marketing Web3?

Back in the day when I was studying film, I remember becoming very interested in all sorts of guerrilla marketing schemes and even today, I sometimes still think about them. Recently I have been listening to many podcasts talking about how to attract Web2 users to Web3. This brought back some ideas I've been thinking and reading about that were used when marketing movies.

Since the idea of Web3 is so radical compared to Web2, should the ways of marketing it to new users also be unconventional? Let's take a look at some examples from the '90s movie marketing.

My First Encounter with Great Marketing

It's actually quite ingenious how the film T2: Judgement Day was marketed to a specific target audience made of teenage boys, just like me. Guns N' Roses was a huge, huge band back then and everyone who liked it also liked it, probably liked Arnold Schwarzenegger and his action stuff too. So, what the studios did was to kind of embed the movie trailer into the video mixing the band and explosive scenes together with an extremely fast pace.

Even as a teen, I remember thinking it was all planned during the shooting of the film. There was one particular scene where the Terminator walked down the hallway loading his sawed-off shotgun that was hidden under a bunch of roses. He then begins to shoot the other terminator and crushes the roses with his boots. Hence, Guns N' Roses.

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Such a clever way of doing marketing I thought. After I did some research for this article I learned how the director James Cameron remembered the thing:

The machinery at TriStar Sony is working and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to do a music video.’ And so they go to Arnold - they didn’t talk to me - and they say, ‘We want you in a music video with some act.’ Arnold says, ‘OK, look, if you’re going to do a music video, you get the biggest band in the world. I don’t even care who they are.’ They flip open Billboard: ‘Guns N’ Roses makes sense. We’ve got a rose in the movie and bloody guns. Good, do it.’

In another scene in the movie, the cool kids are listening to You Could Be Mine on a boombox while speeding away on a cross bike - such a perfect synergy to screw our young minds in the most pleasant way possible. The cashiers on both the film studio and GNR's record label said ching, ching.

My point here is, what about making some likely, or unlikely, alliances with other brands and platforms so that it would in the end benefit both? Using a little bit of imagination we could come up with the craziest collaborations no one ever dared to even think about!

Guerrilla Marketing Taking it a Step Further

I once had this marketing class and our lecturer was talking about guerrilla marketing. A new Spider-Man film was just out and he showed us this slide of an upside-down urinal rigged in the ceiling of some public men's bathroom. Barely visible, there was a small Spider-Man ad next to those who were interested enough to learn more.

Well, when it comes to guerrilla marketing, that's nothing compared to the Blair Witch Project, an indie film that cost $35,000 to shoot and grossed $250 million at the box office mainly for utilizing brave new marketing strategies and the early internet.

The hype apparently started online and reached new heights when the film rights were sold to Artisan for $1.1 million. They then came up with an idea to arrange the IMDB pages of the actors saying they were 'missing, presumed dead'.

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Many viewers were so deep into the hype that they refused to believe the actors were actually alive and attending the premiere. This reminds me of today's world in which people want to believe in ridiculous conspiracy theories and no matter the evidence, they'll keep their stance.

Nevertheless, the marketing gimmicks of BWP were extremely efficient.

But did it deliver?

Promises Vs. Reality

No. Because of the strong marketing campaign, the expectations were obviously sky-high and it became impossible for a low-budget indie film to meet those. Blair Witch Project was boring, done with shaky cameras, a student film-looking piece of "art" that you'd forget soon if it wasn't for the fact that it helped to create a whole new genre of this kind of mockumentaries and would be referred to for a long time.

The risks of creating massive hype using guerrilla marketing tactics become more substantial when we are implementing them onto other products such as web platforms for example.

With a film, you don't have to make people come back over and over again unlike with a website idea that lives and and breathes with the exponential growth of new visitors. Still, I believe guerrilla marketing could very well work with any kind of product - you just have to make sure it really meets the expectations and delivers.

If I had such a project, I would polish the UX to the fullest, making sure everything works to perfection. I would make it a hidden gem that would make the current users proud to be a part of. Perhaps they would be so excited that they would start talking about it all across the wide web and I would be there to feed that excitement with crazy guerrilla marketing ideas while making sure my product is worth all the hype.

The trickiest part is trying to maintain the balance between your hidden gem and the hype you create around it. While filmmakers can get away with it with their crazy marketing stunts, the developers of web applications won't have that luxury.

Conclusion

In today's online world and especially in Web3, the end users are on their toes since there are so many scams and low-quality products. But if you have that diamond in your hands I believe guerrilla marketing could be an excellent(and cheap!) way to reach the masses.

During the past few weeks, I have been taking part in Leo Finance Zealy campaign to onboard new users to Hive and was thinking, could these tactics be used in future campaigns to really boost the interest toward Hive? The '90s were the golden age of movies and the marketing ideas were bold and effective. Could these tactics be applied in the crypto space?

I admit that's pretty hard to give an example of such an idea because they are strongly tied to the actual product. Also, I would imagine creating a buzz sounds way more easier than it actually is but I'm doing my part by tossing these ideas around and hopefully helping in creating a snowball effect. Who knows, maybe you were inspired by this post and will get an excellent marketing idea to make your product the one they're talking about.

Thank you for reading!

Thumbnail image source, thumbnail image made with Canva.

Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha