Movie Marketing Case Study : #PKthemovie

Posted on by Suheil

Have you heard of PK?

Yes, the one which got Aamir Khan to strip naked.

Well, Firstly, just to update people who have become fans of the movie ( even before the movie is released), here is the trailer of the movie which has (finally) been released.

About the Movie

PK is a story of an alien who comes to earth to meet a prostitute with a heart-of-gold and changes the opinion of humans on the existence of God. The alien is played by Aamir Khan and the prostitute by Anushka Sharma. Also the film will have important characters portrayed by Sanjay Dutt and Sushant Singh Rajput.

RajKumar Hirani has stated that the film will be a satire on “Hindu gods and godmen”.

Bu enough about the story. I guess the movie itself would be the best way one can do justice to it. We here, are to talk about the marketing & promotional activities taken by the makers of the movie.

Talking Standees

Now, PK is a UTV production movie starring Aamir Khan. Both the production house & the star are known to market their movies in a different way all the time.

So this time, the team came up with the concept of talking standees. So the standee, apparently, is driven by motion sensors and when you go and stand near the standee, it talks back at you.

These standees created quite a buzz as it was released at the time when only the first poster had released. So a nude Aamir Khan with a transistor would be talking to you. This created a lot of commotion too, and had to be removed from theatres after women complained of the obscenity

They were also placed in wine shops where they got the much needed eyeballs from drunkards as Aamir, reportedly, is to be portrayed as a drunkard.

Of Posters & Motion Posters

Posters were the first way of advertising cinema, right from the time of inception. However, Motion Posters became quite a trend in commercial cinema when Aamir Khan used it to reveal himself in Dhoom 3 (Motion Posters have been around for quite a while in the comic book Industry, but allegedly, It was Aamir’s idea to use the concept for this film to create the hype around it)

This time around, Posters & motion posters were used to create the build-up around the movie. While Movies release their first look with trailers, This movie managed to build all the hype for the release of their trailer itself.

The Story of the Posters

First Poster

The posters were released very strategically, with each poster unveiling one aspect or character of the movie, beginning with the first one, and the most controversial of them all.

this is the first poster that started it all.

I believe their marketing team knows that in India, the only way to get the eyeballs is sex. I would not say that Aamir had to resort to pulling his pants down for attention, but it DID get everyone to turn around and notice.

The day it was launched, the media went berzerk. the responses ranged from being funny to absolutely being shocked!

There were Aamir Khan ‘ Nude with Transistor’ impressions which started happening with some even trying out Social experiments regarding the same.

Kanti Shah even went about making a movie with a similar looking poster just after this one released.

Even Amul took a dig at the poster with its own way:

 

Speculations that the concept was taken from a Spansh movie poster of ‘Quim Barreiros’ also floated around

 

But at the end of the day, the response was as expected. The team were able to get people talking about the movie.

Second & Third Motion Posters: Bhairao Singh

These motion posters were used  to introduce the character of Bhairao Singh, and also (via PR) introduce the story of PK of Aamir being an alien who happened to land on earth & then befriended by Sanjay Dutt.

 

 

Fouth Motion Poster: Watsapp Marketing

The marketing team of PK would be the first team to have truly innovated with Watsapp. For the fouth motion poster for PK, one had to make a facebook group and then add a number of PK to the group so they could receive the motion poster featuring Anushka Sharma.

Many said that this was a strategy which was stolen from the HNY team. Though the HNY team were the first ones to use watsapp, there was no engagement as such, with the people needing to send only a ping to a specific number. Here, people had to get their network engage and only then would they be able to reap the benifits.

Conclusion

The marketing of PK, the movie can be a perfect example for content marketing. They have used minimal inventory of content, churned out a variety of content using that, and have managed to leverage social media & new technological platforms to generate the buzz required for eyeballs for the movie.

Hope the movie lives up to the expectation. 🙂