Smile Director Reveals How MLB Viral Marketing Plan Came Together
The horror film "Smile" was a huge success in 2022 thanks to a particularly clever advertising and viral marketing campaign by Paramount Pictures. Smile uses the centerpiece of his premises (a demonic human imitating entity with an enlarged face) to cut through the noise of the modern world and social media and scare people in the process. Stories of people browsing their social feeds. Only to be horrified by a bizarre gif of smiling people that generated quite a bit of buzz; The film made national headlines for using Major League Baseball in its ads!
If you don't remember: At the end of September 2022, when Smile hits theaters (September 30), the movie invited the cast to play every major MLB game or more before its release. The cast sat just behind the home plate (and later the center of the broadcast), where they wore promotional Smile t-shirts with wry smiles on their faces throughout the game. If that wasn't enough, other smile "plants" popped up in places like The Today Show auditorium, creating a sustained viral buzz that first drew attention, confusing people, and then went viral. The press made subsequent interpretations. Although this marketing and advertising strategy only helped sell Smile to the public, Paramount initially considered it as a broadcast-only version of Paramount.
In terms of box office performance , Smile was a huge success, grossing over $215 million worldwide on a budget of just $17 million. It featured writer/director Parker Finn and Susie Bacon, daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick. In a new interview, Parker reflects on how Finn Smile's unique baseball marketing concept was born:
All of Paramount's departments are incredible experts at what they do and really good at thinking outside the box," Finn told THR. “Mark Weinstock is Paramount's senior president of marketing and he's there. Brian Pianko is creative advertising manager, so all the people who work there are great.
And when the idea of making baseball games fun came up, we talked about it five or six weeks before it happened. And I liked that they wanted to wage a real guerrilla war, and not put a stick in the balance. They said, “If people get it, they will get it. If they don't, there's no harm or guilt involved. It won't cost a lot of money." And the smile first appeared when we were in Austin for the premiere of our Fantastic Fest, and the fact that it went viral was amazing, joyful and exciting.”
Finn also asked if the success of Smiles could lead to a sequel (Smiles?):
“I think there is a lot more to explore in the world of laughter. There are definitely stones that I didn't include in the design. And there are other things that at some point I wanted to include in the film, but it did not make it into the film for some reason, so these things are mine, it's always exciting, but if there is something to laugh at, I never want to repeat or go down the same path again, I want to make sure there's a new, exciting, fresh way that the public doesn't expect, I want to scare them, and I want to find new ways to piss them off.
But how can this be related to the first one, I want it to be a surprise if we do it."
Smile is available to stream on Paramount+.
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