Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 had a solid opening weekend, coming in just behind Furious 7. But before it hit theaters, Viacom was busy making sure that Paul Blart fans everywhere knew he was back on the scene. To do this, they combined forces with talent familiar to fans likely to buy a ticket to see a Mall Cop movie.
Jessie James Decker, country music star and CMT talent, joined Kevin James, as Paul Blart, to make a music video that as of Monday morning, had been streamed 1.3 million times on their Facebook pages. Adam Steingart, SVP of Integrated Marketing, at CMT said over email that:
Jessie and Kevin are both tremendous talents, and we wanted to use their talents to create something authentic to both brands. We combined Jessie’s songwriting skills with Kevin’s comedic timing, and ended up with this really funny, tongue-in-cheek video.
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The video stands alone out there — it has nothing to do, specifically, with the new movie. It’s a good example of looking at content, especially television and film franchises, as brands. Some ratings and analytics pros, like ListenFirst Media, who produce the Digital Audience Ratings, already do this. This means that Mall Cop or Paul Blart can survive across social media even after the movie goes to DVD in a few weeks. Looking at the character and the film as a brand, rather than just content, is fundamental to shifting how you think about promoting it.
It’s also a good example of using all the resources around you to create authentic content that works in everyone’s favor. And the point, according to Steingart, is not to focus on how a video will perform across platforms, but to create content that “adds value or entertains the consumer.” It also doesn’t hurt to have built-in reach. He told me that:
The Viacom ecosystem allows us to give it scale and ensure it reaches the widest audience possible. In this instance, the content worked seamlessly across all of our screens. We debuted the video on our weekly countdown show, “CMT Hot 20 Countdown,” and amplified that across CMT.com and our social pages. We also strategically aligned our plans with talent to build awareness, and it spread organically from there.
Across Facebook and Twitter, the video’s reached, according to CMT, an audience of 9,182,720. Steingart says that based on their internal framework to measure success based on metrics, the “video has really delivered across all fronts.”