Marvel characters have become a key example of good marketing.For Disney, Marvel is a goose that lays the golden eggs, but also a perfect excuse to build audience loyalty. The strategy that Disney +, its streaming platform, has followed to capture viewers is to launch series after series of its star franchises.
The last one is expected by the Loki community. Loki has been so successful that it has led Disney to advance its launch day for the new chapters. Instead of doing it on Fridays, now it will do it on Wednesdays (which will remain as the usual date for premieres). Loki is to Disney + what Bridgerton or Lupine were to Netflix. It has become his most watched premiere and his character in the great engine of interest for the platform.
What do brands and advertisers paint in all this? Disney + does not have ads and the platform itself has already made it clear that it will not have them. The margin of maneuver for brands lies in what they can do in terms of product placement (and Loki is not a period series: it allows to do it) and in how they manage to connect outside the closed environment of streaming to the series, its character and the products that put money.
Marvel characters have already been the protagonists in the past of commercialization movements. Disney has already written them off in toys, derivatives and advertisements. Some of its characters have been the protagonists of various campaigns for all kinds of products.
However, what is happening now with Loki and an advertiser, Hyundai, could serve as a key to understanding what ad campaigns can be like in the age of streaming. Loki has a car from the South Korean company, at least in the advertisements, although these are not advertisements-advertisements.
They enter the narrative universe of the series.
The American media talk more than tie-ins advertising campaigns. You could almost say that they are co-branding actions , an element now in vogue. The brand does not present them as advertisements, but as vignettes, and the actions work within the storyline of the series and the character.
In other words, they are almost a bit closer to content marketing and they have a certain logic. “We’ve been able to go in and tell stories within that world, so it’s less of a Loki in a car ad,” Mindy Hamilton, Marvel’s senior vice president of deal marketing, told the US press. It’s like an extension of what the series’ narrative shows, thus connected on a deeper level.
As they point out in the Los Angeles Times , it could even be said that the cartoons not only sell the Hyundai car but also promote Disney + and its series offering at a time when both have tougher competition than ever. The idea is already being a success. The first of these tie-ins, in which Loki owns a Tucson model car, achieved two million viewings in 24 hours, according to US media accounts .
He did it before officially going on the market and only in the publications that the series made on social networks. The final scope could thus be much larger. In addition to Loki, the announcements will also connect with Wandavision and T he Falcon and the Winter Soldier . From now on, the campaign will be served on multiple advertising channels.