Edition 122 is here, and this week, I’m looking into the multifaceted marketing behind the box office hit Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Plus, some speed reads:

Let’s get into it (I’m not clever enough for a Spider-Man-related pun here, sorry friends.)

My first staff journalism job was as an ‘SEO Film Reporter’ at a UK broadsheet. I wrote a lot of ‘is there a post-credit scene’ articles and almost all of them were tied to Marvel films. As someone not particularly interested in Marvel, these stories were the bane of my existence. But their success allowed me to do other, more interesting things.

Fast forward almost a decade, and Marvel is still, unsurprisingly, one of the biggest franchises to date. Despite peaks and troughs, the latest outing has proven that Marvel fever hasn’t dimmed. 

Since that first job, I’ve had a lot of other roles and as my career has grown, I told a lot of my friends that I was relieved to never have to write about Marvel again… unless I really wanted to.

And here I am! Because I couldn’t look at how Spider-Man: Brand New Day was promoted and not get into it.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is having a record-breaking box office run; it beat Avengers: Endgame's all-time domestic opening record with $360 million, and it’s the film with the highest-grossing first week in box office history. It's also the subject of Hollywood's largest-ever brand partnership campaign.

With such a huge marketing spend, there’s bound to be variance in the success of each campaign. The contradiction between what worked and what didn’t is where the meat of the story lies: how the exact same partner can get it right in one channel and wrong in another.

Sony's promotional campaign for Brand New Day generated a record $309 million in worldwide media value across 165 brand partners, breaking the previous record Sony itself set with Far From Home back in 2019. There’s several reasons for the upswing. As Forbes explained, cable subscriptions have fallen from 88% of US households in 2010 to under 50% today, and influencer marketing, the channel that absorbed a lot of that fleeing ad spend, has a ceiling. No single creator can guarantee millions of viewers with no skip button, but a theatrical blockbuster still can.

165 brand partners is a lot, but only a handful of those brands actually got on screen, and the ones that did were deliberate story choices, not logo placement. Spider-Man uses a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, Little Caesars (a US fast-food pizza joint) is name-checked, ASUS rigs sit in the background of multiple scenes, and BMWs move through the city as part of the world-building.

What this discrepancy highlights is that the brands that actually make it onto the screen itself are the ones that have a natural fit within the story.

The two campaigns I was actually into had a similar strategy at their heart: turning a passive promotional moment into something a fan could do.

Sony built SpideyTracker.com with Google Maps Platform and Samsung, an interactive map spanning 35 countries with sightings, campaign events, and easter eggs, including five hidden Spider-Man scenes staged and shot into actual Street View imagery around New York City for fans to go and physically discover. It's a scavenger hunt layered onto an app most people already have open on their phone anyway.

Sony Pictures Canada, working with UM Canada and Spotify, went in a completely different but equally participatory direction: a campaign that turns three years of a fan's own listening history into a "journey" through the Spider-Man franchise, complete with a custom "Brand New Playlist" and a physical gesture (flipping your phone upside down) that triggers Spider-Man's signature hanging pose alongside the data reveal.

Spotify is really going in on their tie-ins. I wrote about the similar logic behind ATP and Spotify launching Tour Sounds, a player-curated playlist series that turned Spotify from a place ATP's content lived into a place ATP actively shaped fan discovery. This was similar to a previous fan-built FIFA playlist that had already racked up 158,000 saves with zero brand involvement. Spotify has created a repeatable strategy that Sony deployed in a way that fit its IP, and resonates with its fans.

Both of these strategies take something passive (watching a film) and tap into something that truly resonates within fandom: giving someone something to participate in. As we’ve covered before, making fandom participatory adds a deeper level of engagement and brand retention.

For fans who love Spider-Man, being able to integrate that IP, that story, into their music listening habits just adds another way to engage with the thing they love, and another way to shape their identity around it.

Starting July 27, BMW pushed a promotional banner for Brand New Day to iDrive infotainment screens on cars built after July 2020, reaching more than 70 markets. If you tap it, the screen transitions to a 19-second animation with a synced ambient-lighting show. BMW called it a "special surprise." Owners on Reddit called it everything from "classless and tacky" to "disgusting," with several asking for an opt-out that doesn't exist.

So was this a step too far? Was the vehicle not the right vehicle for the promotion?

BMW maintains the animation "is not an ad" but rather part of a broader partnership with the film, which is technically true: BMW vehicles are integrated into the movie itself, one of the deliberate on-screen placements Forbes flagged.

It goes to show that despite it being the same brand, inside the same campaign, running two versions of the same idea, it’s a fine line between feeling contextual and part of the story, and feeling intrusive.

Indeed, a 2023 Journal of Marketing Communications study showed that intrusive advertising “leads to psychological reactance and consequently a loss of sense of agency, which results in negative brand outcomes.”

More interestingly, the study says “it is likely that a reduced sense of agency is experienced when the viewing activity or focal task is interrupted”. If there’s anywhere you want to keep your focus on the task at hand, it’s probably behind the wheel of your car.

Ads that had a skip option led to more brand preference. In this case, the Spider-Man spot originates as a banner ad when the car is started, and if you click on the banner, it plays the video with no option to stop or skip it (per the Hollywood Reporter; I don’t own a car…).

As some of you may recall, I wrote about a similar strategy, in a different medium and with a different outcome, when Discord and Sony ran a Missions Quest campaign for Resident Evil paired with a physical activation at Comic-Con. In that case, there was a product experience, a digital experience, and a life experience that handed off to each other rather than compete with each other. BMW tried to make the car itself the ‘life experience’ of this campaign, but in this humble editorial leads opinion, treated the cars and their drivers as inventory it owned rather than a relationship it had to earn access to.

So remember: the channel matters as much as the creative you’re deploying. The exact same asset can either be a nice touch, or an invasion of privacy, depending entirely on whether the audience opted for it to be there.

There’s three questions I think are worth answering for any brand-IP tie-in. 

1. Is this a channel the fan opted into, or one you're borrowing access to because you happen to own the hardware?

2. Does it give them something to do, or just something to look at? 

3. Would they have said yes if you'd asked first, rather than just shipping it via an update? 

SpideyTracker and the Spotify campaign pass all three. BMW's dashboard push fails the first and third one, and that’s costing them a chunk of goodwill from their consumers.

I'll also flag the obvious caveat: none of this is denting the box office. Brand New Day is still the biggest film of the year, and the $309 million marketing record will get cited as a success regardless of one activation that didn’t quite hit the mark.

As I said at the start of this newsletter, in a marketing campaign of this size there’s bound to be integrations that work and ones that don’t quite hit the mark, but what is certainly true is the scale of Sony’s ambition definitely delivered.

Being in ‘The Club’ gets you closer to exclusive tickets to Premier League matches, merchandise, discounts, and experiences.

TL:DR

Why you should care

Sports loyalty clubs are nothing new — there’s plenty of them out there, all with their own unique selling points, like the Cleveland Cavaliers’ one, which we covered in edition 33. And Coca-Cola and the Premier League’s The Club is a loyalty scheme that has plenty of interesting strategy at its core. In particular, it has built-in retention and long-term engagement mechanics: tier maintenance thresholds, a rolling qualification window, points that separate from status.

The decay mechanic is an interesting bit, too. An Icon member has to earn 2,000 points every 90 days just to hold that tier, so the reward for buying Coca-Cola isn't something you do and bank once for life. It's something you have to do, ongoing, to keep your tier. These are strategies that feel like they belong to an airline or hotel loyalty scheme, and they create a natural ongoing engagement (and spend) as a result. Similarly, the 10-pin daily cap keeps purchase behaviour frequent rather than a single big shop. It’s designed to keep you coming back.

The Club also carries more than one partnership: Costa's free-drink offer and the Liverpool FC prize draw both run off the same points system. This lets Coca-Cola run multiple partnerships off one piece of infrastructure rather than three separate schemes.

What makes this one interesting is its scope and retention strategy. It’s built to last beyond one Premier League season and keep fans using it, and earning points, year-round.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!