Wild ride for fans
At off-site marketing activations, it’s all about the experience
BY JEN YAMATO >>> SAN DIEGO — The first superfans began lining up early Thursday for an exclusive, once-in-alifetime event at Comic-Con International: Taco Bell.
This year, the hottest fan opportunity wasn’t a starstudded panel in Hall H or autographs on the convention hall’s main floor. It was entry into the futuristic Taco Bell pop-up at Greystone Prime Steakhouse & Seafood in the nearby Gaslamp Quarter — not just any Taco Bell, but a neon-lighted futuristic replica of the one in the 1993 Sylvester Stallone sci-fi pic “Demolition Man,” re-created in lavish detail for the film’s 25th anniversary, complete with bright blue cocktails, robot waiters and Crunchwraps.
Fans came, ate, marveled and, more important, shared their selfies and excitement on social media.
Batman, Superman and the Avengers still rule at the massive annual fan confab, of course. Hundreds of thousands of obsessive fanatics still flood the streets of San Diego sporting geek T-shirts and superhero costumes to be among the first to catch exclusive glimpses of their favorite (and soon-to-be-favorite) TV shows and movies.
But thanks to the explosion of fandom culture, the rise of social media and the hunger of marketing executives to launch brands of all kinds at the biggest pop culture marketing event of the year, the times are a-changing across this multimillion-dollar nexus of far-flung galaxies and fantastical universes.
Savvy marketing execs are increasingly adding to their traditional media presences on Comic-Con panels — or bypassing them — by staging high-priced campaigns in the Gaslamp Quarter, where experiential marketing has become the trend. Con-goers wandering the area last week could visit the worlds of DC Comics, play a “South Park” escape game, run from zombies at AMC’s “Walking Dead”-themed DeadZone and feel John Krasinski standing watch from the Omni Hotel, where his face was plastered on the side of the skyscraper in character as Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the star of his own upcoming Amazon series.
Warner Bros. and DC’s “Aquaman” and “Wonder Woman” filled the cavernous Hall H in Saturday’s highprofile official studio panel, but for the last several years, major studios including Disney have sat out Comic-Con. Now it’s primarily television networks trying to expand awareness for upcoming products by introducing them to prospective fans here — and they’re increasingly thinking outside the traditional geek-culture box to do so.
This year, attendees crossing the trolley tracks into the sprawling San Diego Convention Center first walked past the eye-catching, cheerily yellow house from NBC’s afterlife comedy “The Good Place.”
Inside the house, a Comic-Con-exclusive video starring cast members Ted Danson and D’Arcy Carden welcomed fans into a live “experience” involving giant shrimp cocktail carousels, RFID bracelets tracking fans’ voluntarily registered personal details, cupcakes and a host of in-world actors.
“‘The Good Place’s’ audience is very digitally savvy — and coincidentally, we’ve learned over the years that the sci-fi audience overlaps a lot with the audience” of “The Good Place,” said NBC’s Gerry Logue, executive vice president of digital and print creative. “‘Supernatural,’ ‘The Walking Dead’ — they both index high with our [viewers]. So we felt like it was a natural fit.”
An estimated 135,000 fans attended last year’s event, which began humbly nearly 50 years ago with just 300 attendees. A four-day pass to the event now costs $235, and those who want to see headlining panels can count on hours of wait time.
Not surprisingly, each year, Comic-Con draws thousands more badgeless visitors to the surrounding downtown streets, where properties such as “Star Trek” and FX’s “Sons of Anarchy” spinoff “Mayans M.C.” give even unofficial con-goers plenty to gawk at, snap and selfie.
The biggest room in the official Comic-Con program, Hall H, can fit only 6,500 fans. Staging an activation — as the pop-up attractions are called — outside the convention, on the other hand, can reach hundreds of thousands of eyeballs, and giving the fans an experience-driven interaction increases their emotional investment with the products and makes them more likely to share that experience with friends.
This year’s largest marketing presence came courtesy of Amazon’s “Jack Ryan.” In addition to the Omni building ad, the company built out a sprawling “hyper-reality virtual-reality spy experience” in a massive compound where fans could zip line from a helicopter, run a training course, explore a bazaar and play an in-world escape room.
“The activation is all about ... putting the fan in the shoes that Jack Ryan is in in the series: He’s making the transition from just an analyst at a desk, to all of a sudden, he’s in the field,” said Greg Hart, vice president of Amazon Video. “So the goal of the activation is to take that feeling and put fans into exactly that scenario.”
It helps to have a gimmick, a good location and a budget, even if most companies decline to divulge just how much they spend; the best activations have a physical presence passersby want to snap, even if they don’t have the stamina or time to wait in long lines.
“Everybody wants to show the cool, fun thing that they tried and that they did, and I think that lines up nicely with what we’re trying to create — environments and elements that are easily shareable,” said Ryan Crosby, vice president of content marketing at Hulu, which this year focused its efforts on promoting Wednesday’s premiere of its new Stephen King horror series, “Castle Rock.”
To introduce fans to the world of the show, which is based on the fictional town familiar to fans of King ’s novels, Hulu built an elaborate 70,000-square-foot haunted house “bed-and-breakfast” a few blocks away from the convention center. “We want to remove the glass from in between the fan and the world,” Crosby said. “There’s an opportunity to let them touch it, feel it and experience it in different ways.”
USA Network also took a twofold approach to launching its upcoming “The Purge” television series at Comic-Con. In addition to hosting a panel, the network built out a 3,000-square-foot Purge City party store with a space big enough to accommodate up to 100 fans an hour.
Inside, visitors engaged with 12 “party planner” actors posing as store employees and could go home with a selection of “Purge” items created just for the activation. The aim was to let fans familiar with the popular “Purge” horror movies know that there’s a television adaptation coming to screens this fall.
“You have 135,000 engaged and avid fans in one place, and I think those are the people that really appreciate the fanatical devotion of detail that goes into an experience like this,” said Colleen Mohan, senior vice president of brand marketing for USA Network.
Grandesign is a marketing company that offers an array of branding servicesm including the traditional “Jack Ryan” building wrap it plastered on the side of the Omni Hotel.
But Grandesign also saw opportunity in activation mania. This year, partnering with the San Diego Padres and sponsor Lexus, it filled a 3-acre blacktop at Petco Park with “experiences” from more than 20 media brands, including a stunt activation for Marvel’s “Cloak and Dagger,” a 40-foot Discovery Channel “Sharkzilla” and an interactive UFO experience for History Channel’s “Project Blue Book.” Attendees needed no badge to enter the multi-experience activation where food trucks, a beer garden and a performance stage complimented the one-stop marketing carnival across from the convention.
It’s a smaller-scale budgetary commitment for brands that desire the exposure of marketing to the Comic-Con crowds without necessarily investing in a full-on activation build, or arranging an official panel or presence inside the convention center.
“A lot of brands struggle with it,” said Grandesign Chief Operating Officer Robert Ridgeway. “But the younger generations do a lot of transacting and watching and buying and playing through their computers and phones, but the biggest thing they still want to do is to touch and feel and experience things.”
As Comic-Con has exploded in size and marketing intensity, so has the definition of what constitutes a relevant fandom.
About eight months ago, Taco Bell teamed up with Warner Bros. to transform a multilevel restaurant on busy 5th Avenue in the heart of downtown into the fourcourse fine dining establishment straight out of the future as seen a quarter of a century ago in “Demolition Man.”
The film is set in 2032, when Taco Bell is “the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars,” Sandra Bullock explains to Stallone in a scene from the cult genre flick. “Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.”
“Every day we see someone reference Taco Bell in relation to ‘Demolition Man,’ ” said Matt Prince, senior manager for public relations and brand experience, whose team incorporated costumes and props from the film and brought in 5,000 units of ingredients to stage the immersive bar and restaurant — all free to the 1,000 lucky patrons who made it inside.
“When you look at the movie and people who are fans of the movie, there’s a huge overlap with the Comic-Con crowd, and this is the holy grail of sci-fi,” added Prince. “What better place to bring it to life than here?”
Times staff writer Chris Barton contributed to this report. jen.yamato@latimes.com