Brief
In response to the phenomenal success of The Lego Movie and Will Arnett’s take on Batman as one of the central charcters, Warner Bros wisely decided to give the Plastic Caped Crusader his own movie.
A challenge that the original film over-came pretty much by word of mouth, was that parents were initially hesitant to take their kids to see The Lego Movie fearing there would be nothing in it for them. As anyone who’s seen that film knows, it’s full of enough knowing gags and satire to keep the Mums and Dads happy too.
When it came to The Lego Batman Movie, Warner Bros wanted to nip any concerns in the bud by creating a promotional campaign that made it clear Bats’ own film would be just as much fun for parents as it was for kids.
Solution
We identified that the solution to the problem of getting Parents on board for Bats lied in a campaign that was super relevant and disruptive. We couldn’t just tell them The Lego Batman Movie was a film for them too, we had to prove it by crashing Lego Batman into the places they already loved and let him do his hilarious, egotistical thing.
As this was about making a big splash, quickly and our target audience were still big TV watchers, we knew that was where we needed to be. We also knew however that traditional TV advertising wasn’t going to cut it. We had to be subversive and bust our way into the very fabric of the TV Channels the audience loved.
Our initial thought was to do multiple deals with production companies to allow Batman to crash into some of the most popular shows for Parents. However it soon became clear that would be a logistical and budgetary nightmare. So instead we landed on the idea of Batman taking over continuity. This way he could still make snarky comments about the channel’s content, but without all the licensing and contractual headaches. It also allowed us to populate the schedule with Lego Batman and target our audience even more finely by placing these alternative announcements around specific shows that appealed to them.
After much cajoling and “come on, it’ll be great!” conversations with Channel 4 we got them onboard.
We knew we had access to Will Arnett to voice our sketches, and then we got the news that the guys who animated the film itself in Burbank wanted to create our films for us.
We wrote 50 scripts. Will Arnett chose the 25 he liked best and we went to town.
It’s hard to think of anything more exciting than hearing a comic actor at the top of his game take your scripts and make them even better just by messing around. Then seeing them come to life with Hollywood animators was the icing on the cape.
Results
The Lego Batman Movie Channel 4 takeover was seen by 40% of the population in only four days, and one in six viewers booked a ticket to see the film as a result.
The campaign also pulled in a horde of awards.