Ep 23 Deadpool 2: Now With Meta-Marketing
On Today’s Pop100 it’s Deadpool Method, part 2! Where we learn if Deadpool 2 can make lightning strike twice with its marketing cocktail made of 2 parts meta, 1 part post-modernism w/ just a dash of unicorn tears.
Previously on Pop100, We left Ryan Reynolds & the 20th Century Fox marketing team trapped between the first Deadpool movie & its sequel, wondering how they were going to top the immense success of the first film and the anti-marketing, guerrilla marketing approach that doused the current entertainment marketing rule book in cheap booze and set it on fire.
The pressure was on. Unlike the first movie, Deadpool 2 was now all growns up and a real live summer blockbuster, not to mention a summer blockbuster released mere weeks after Avenger’s Infinity War, arguably the largest superhero genre movie ever created.
For Deadpool 1, we talked about the "bottoms-up” nature of the "Deadpool Method" and how Ryan Reynolds utilized fan culture to create a groundswell that literally willed the idea of Deadpool into existence.
With the 2nd movie, The big question was if the "Deadpool Method" of marketing would scale. Which, yes sounds ridiculous. Joe, if you throw money at things, things get easier and better. But trust me on this, constraints breed creative thinking & as contradictory as it may seem, loads of cash can quickly get you to the mundane mountain if you don’t have a laser-focused idea powering the warp engines.
Lucky for us, Reynolds bet on red & doubled down on the tactics that had worked for the 1st movie, utilizing the extra cash to turn the META up to 11.
Meta? What's Meta? Ahhh, well, meta is the magic ingredient, META is the idea that powers Deadpool, the film, and the now-famous marketing campaign.
Greek for Beyond or outside, the meta I'm talking about is the showing or suggesting of the awareness of oneself as a member of a category. So if I say Deadpool is a meta-comic book, what I mean is that Deadpool is a comic character that is aware he is a comic book character. The character takes this meta with him wherever he goes, so when Deadpool is in a movie, he knows he's in a movie, he knows that the actor Ryan Reynolds portrays him, he lives in 2 worlds at once, 1 foot in the audience's world & 1 in his own fiction. So once you get the concept of meta and how it follows Deadpool wherever he goes, it didn't take the marketing team long to make the connection that to promote Deadpool 2, they'd use Meta-Marketing. Marketing that knows it's marketing.
So how did meta-marketing work with Deadpool 2?
Tons of 4th wall breaking and reference of popular culture in our world, both very meta techniques, like the pre-roll trailer in Logan and the Bob Ross “wet on wet” teaser trailer,
Untraditional brand partnerships also kept the meta-messaging burning hot like Espolòn Tequila where Deadpool was named their creative director, Devour microwaveable man meals, Mike’s Harder Lemonade, 7-Eleven, and Trolli where you could choke down an exclusive “Tiny Hands” version of their gummy treats.
Putting Deadpool where he shouldn’t be or with someone he shouldn’t become a strong tactic that creates a contrasting combination that is hard not to get the internet talking, like the cover on the 2017 holiday issue of Good Housekeeping, or the extremely serious music video featuring Celine Dion. Yep couldn’t make that up, it’s almost like it was a bet.
In the end, Deadpool 2 which cost around $110,000 million to create, netted almost $800,000 worldwide.
And they weren’t done yet.
Maybe my favorite marketing tactic of the last 10 years was during the release of the Deadpool 2 DVD where Deadpool 2 worked with Wal-Mart to utilize maybe the most visible, publicly known, and underutilized marketing space known to humankind. The $5 DVD rack!
Overnight, Wal-Mart had switched out all of the classic bargain bin DVD covers with Deadpool variants. From Terminator, Edward Scissorhands, Predator, Office Space to Revenge of the Nerds, they were all there and they were all DEADPOOL DVDs.
More proof that in an era when we all have connected cameras at our hip everywhere we go, that there is no such thing as dead advertising space if you do something remarkable.
Everything that Ryan Reynolds learned about marketing Deadpool would end up becoming formalized when Reynolds hired George Dewey from Fox to create his own production house, Maximum Effort Production that is now famous for the quick turn, bottoms-up, meta-marketing approach of The Deadpool Method, Which would break free of the Deadpool character and let the marketing philosophy loose on the entire world, in which we’ll talk all about on the next episode of Pop100.
I hope everyone is staying healthy, giving yourself a ton of grace during this time, getting outside as much as possible and remember that in times of instability and pressures of the unknown create the perfect environment for Pop-Marketing as people need some freaking escape from the real world as much as they need the inspiring unprecedented times’ stuff.
I’m Joe Cox the Pop-Marketer, you can check out more videos at Pop-Marketer.com and while you’re there you can signup to my email Pop-Rocks where you can keep up with all that is Pop-Marketing in the news as well as updates on all my new content.
I’ve missed all of you and so happy to be back creating Pop100. Miss you, miss your show, see you soon. Buh-Bye.