‘Making advertising a little bit more entertaining’: Why brands like Liberty Mutual, Bushmills and Booking.com are partnering with entertainment on co-marketing efforts

By Julian Cannon

Liberty Mutual’s rolling out a new ad this month featuring familiar animated characters: Minions. The insurer is doing so as part of a co-marketing effort to promote the Liberty Mutual’s offerings as well as the upcoming Minions movie, Minions: The Rise of Gru.

Liberty Mutual isn’t alone in partnering with an entertainment property for advertising. Brands such as Booking.com, Bushmills and Liberty Mutual have recently done this with their launches of promotional campaigns for the month of June. By working with entertainment properties with recognizable characters, marketers believe they can help their brands stand out in an increasingly cluttered, noisy and fragmented ad environment as people feel a connection to the characters they may see in co-marketing efforts.

“Consumers are now watching movies with ensemble casts and characters from across one or multiple franchises,” said Jenna Lebel, Liberty Mutual chief marketing officer, global retail markets in the U.S. “We feel that consumers are interested in seeing this in their advertising, too, and making advertising a little bit more entertaining and less sort of disruptive to the content that you want to be streaming.”

Lebel added that brands must reach out to consumers in new and innovative ways beyond what they have done in the past as the advertising market is oversaturated. “As the advertising landscape becomes more cluttered, video consumption is very fragmented.”

Liberty Mutual’s spots featuring Minion characters will run across a variety of platforms, including TV, online video and social media, during the eight-week window surrounding the release of Illumination’s upcoming movie Minions: The Rise of Gru, in theaters July 1st. It’s unclear how much the effort cost or how much the company and movie studio may have saved on advertising as the company declined to share those figures. Liberty Mutual previously worked with Sony on a co-marketing effort for Spiderman: No Way Home’s release last year.

Co-marketing efforts aren’t always traditional ad spots. Booking.com worked with Warner Bros’ Elvis on a co-marketing effort this month as well, offering fans a chance to stay at The Guest House at Graceland in Memphis as the “Ultimate Elvis Experience” in time for biopic’s release in theaters in North America on June 24. And Bushmills and entertainment AI company BEN Group partnered with Netflix to release a limited edition whiskey product in support of the original series Peaky Blinders. An influencer marketing campaign has been developed by BEN to further promote the launch.

Marketers and agency execs believe co-marketing between brands and entertainment properties will continue to grow and evolve as brands look for ways to stand out and get consumers attention, something that’s become more and more difficult in recent years.

Marketers say the drive isn’t simply partnering to save ad dollars — they declined to share figures for the partnerships or how much partnering saves on media spending — but to stay top of mind for consumers. “I really see that it’s an opportunity and it’s a dual strategy for a lot of brands that we work with,” …read more

Source:: Digiday