Pink goes good with green, according to Glinda the Good herself, and the at least 64 and counting brand deals that have saturated the consumer products market ahead of the release of Wicked.
After Barbie brand collaborations took the blockbuster movie-brand partnership playbook to another level, this year’s Wicked release has delivered a similarly supersized campaign as part of a marketing effort that Universal Pictures CMO Michael Moses promised would be “just short of obnoxious.” Some of the collabs so far include Galindifed shoes from Aldo, Ozmopolitan luggage from Beís, and scandalacious cocktail kits from Pernod Ricard.
While pink-hued films can attract brand and customer attention, leaning into a blockbuster movie moment creates a mutually beneficial relationship for both studios and brands, according to several marketers and experts who spoke to Marketing Brew.
“This, for us, is really a way to increase our brand demand, increase our share of voice, increase buzz, and offer our existing consumers something really surprising,” said Amanda Amar, VP of global brand strategy, PR, and social media at Aldo, which partnered with Wicked on a collection of styles.
The brand-blockbuster cinematic universe
Aldo released collaborations with both Barbie and Wicked, which gave the brand’s creative team the ability to make plenty of references to the films in its products and “interpret the merger” of the movie worlds and the brand’s world, Amar told Marketing Brew. For its Wicked collection, Aldo incorporated Glinda’s wand into one shoe’s heel and added an “E” initial charm on another style that pays homage to Elphaba.
Both the brand and the studio side are involved in the early stages of the design process, Amar said, and Aldo’s design team reviews its existing collections and best-sellers to determine the features and elements that could work best for co-branded products.
After the Barbie collaboration, Aldo clocked a “significant lift in brand demand,” Amar said, with elevated search levels for Aldo lasting for 12 months after the partnership debuted. Its Wicked collaboration resulted in an average 6% engagement rate on social media and a 3.5% clickthrough rate on ads in the first week, she said.
The entertainment industry offers a vast universe of opportunities for other brands to expand their worlds, according to Ricardo Briceno, chief business officer at Gamefam, the developer behind games like Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon and Sonic Speed Simulator.
Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon, which debuted on Roblox in partnership with Mattel last fall, is one of several games borne out of popular movie IP; Gamefam has also worked with the campaigns for The Garfield Movie, Talk to Me, and Inside Out 2.
With movie campaigns, “there is no written playbook, and there’s a lot of innovation,” which can be exciting, Briceno said.
“Our task is to understand how the brand, the IP, can be appealing to the audience,” Briceno said. “In the case of movies…they tend to be character or fantasy, imagination-driven. Because of that, they lend themselves really well to be translated into world or character engagement.”
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Using the movie’s universes and characters can help drive engagement results for Gamefam’s games while driving awareness of the movies they are based on, particularly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha audiences, Briceno said. For The Garfield Movie, Gamefam created a movie-themed five-game takeover on Roblox, which generated more than 31 million total visits to the games and 334 million minutes of brand engagement, according to the company.
A meeting of audiences
While movie magic can create memorable experiences for both brands and studios, a sometimes overlooked advantage of collabs is the wealth of audience data that both entities can bring to the table, Jessica Shapiro, CMO at LiveRamp, a platform that works with advertisers to bring company data together, said.
“The depth of the insights that they can get about who their customers are, who’s interested, what [are the] demographics, what excites them, what they’re buying, is so much richer,” Shapiro said. “They’re able to, in a very precise, targeted way, expand their user base.”
When brands and entertainment studios choose to work together, she said, partners can share first-party data that consumers have consented to being collected and shared. A movie studio, for example, may have data points on a fan’s entertainment habits, like the ratings of movies they like to watch, while a clothing brand could share sizing and customer geographic information. Combining data sets has the potential to help both companies understand customer habits better, Shapiro said.
“By bringing those insights together, you can get a really robust picture,” Shapiro said.
A pop-culture wave or wall?
Audiences, though, don’t always view movie-brand partnerships positively. When it feels like a brand is hopping on a movie’s hype train without obvious relevancy, instead of defying gravity, “it can land like a lead balloon,” Shapiro said.
Some consumers have already voiced their disapproval of the ongoing Wicked campaign. “Nothing seemed intentional for the movie or within a theme,” one user posted on X, adding that it seemed “they just licensed wicked for every single product to exist.” Vulture compiled a list of “the most egregious Wicked marketing stunts,” while Cracked called the movie’s marketing campaign “an unmitigated disaster.”
Briceno said his team is focused on collaborations that they feel can make an impression. “The challenge becomes, how do you do it in a way that stands out?” he said. he said.
For a brand that’s now participated in two major movie campaigns, Amar acknowledged that it’s a careful line to walk.
“Knowing the amount of collaborating partners that Mattel or Universal have had around these launches, it’s [about] making sure to strike the balance between standing out but also riding that wave,” Amar said. “The more everybody’s talking about it, the more that it’s in your face…there’s so much more opportunity and appetite from the customer to take part.”