Angry Birds Rio - App advertising

Have a watch of this. Basically a marketing collaboration between the Angry Birds team and the new film Rio. An interesting and potentially annoying but, commerically viable advertising medium that I reckon will become more popular in the next year or so.

For the Film producers audience these days, they need to target a far more mobile and digital consumer, the consumer not content with getting their movie info from the 15 mins before the film starts, or the advert in a local paper. We are looking at social media campaigns, Twitter and Facebook fan pages, with integrated gamification as well as competitions, and the "oh so popular" teaser trailer campaigns, and product syndications.

However over the past 2-3 months and particularly in the animation genre of films I have really started to notice the addition of movie centric apps used only as marketing aids to the movie - rather than as additional revenue streams, for viewers after seeing the movie.  These apps are usually traditional game formats, glossed out with new little teaser content and better graphical content. They tend to be free, however I see that this collaboration appears to be a full game release as well as a marketing campaign, could we see more of this in the future?

This is nothing new, from the game perspective as developers have always seen advantages in leveraging the brand of popular shows/films/games as a means to increase game sales through bespoke licensing deals, however this could be a new theory for the film companies? using the application development and game itself as a pre-release advertising aid.

Check out the Rio trailer here

Angry Birds RIO

available on iphone and ipad here



A couple of others I have noticed.

HOP - referencing doodle jump



Shrek Karting HD - mario kart (although I think this was a post film release)



Also of interest, not a game, but a pre-movie marketing app release (i know there are loads of these, but this is just one of the examples!).

Paul - That alien film.
iOS image manipulation app.