Universal Pictures promotes Despicable Me 2 with pan-European interactive OOH campaign featuring the Minions
To promote the theatrical release of Despicable Me 2 Universal Pictures has mounted a mobile controlled, personalised, geo-specific digital out of home campaign spanning five European territories.
Covering the UK, France, Spain, Norway and Finland, the interactive campaign will run on Clear Channel’s network of digital screens in shopping centres and invites consumers to control and personalise the on-screen creative using their mobile phone.
David Roddick, Clear Channel International’s sales director, said of the campaign: “This kind of creative execution shows the potential multimedia campaigns have when using out-of-home to engage, stimulate and interact with audiences via mobile devices. It captures the personality of the minions and brings the movie's character to life for cinema-goers of all ages, communicating a compelling message about how much fun the Despicable Me franchise is.”
Conceived by Clear Channel, planned and coordinated by TED@MediaCom and powered by an app designed and built by Grand Visual, the interactive campaign links input from the users SMS or web app to prompt more than 30 animated sequences to create the interactive experience.
“Clever use of technology is at the heart of this bespoke Pan European campaign. The execution combines interactivity, personalisation, and fun whilst generating user-centric content for social media sharing. It's a massively complex project but demonstrates truly ambitious use of the medium,” commented Dan Dawson, creative and technology director at Grand Visual.
The creative itself features Gru’s mischievous Minions who tap their feet impatiently whilst waiting for someone to command them. The Minions appear with a call to action asking passers-by to text to see them dance, wrestle, play, build or boogie.
To interact with the Minions users need to text any command along with their name to a shortcode and minutes later the Minions will act out the instruction accordingly along with an on-screen thanks to the participant. Users will also be rewarded with a text linking them to a copy of the personalised Minion film which they can then share via social media.
Digital out of home campaign management dashboard OpenLoop has been employed to power the real time interaction as well as personalising the copy and playout with location specific geotargeted responses.
A total of 259 digital screens in 51 shopping centres will run the creative with the interactive experience supported by additional static and digital formats. Social and online channels will also support the out of home experience with an online version also running.