The movie marketing industry is no stranger to interactive movie posters. In the past, interactive displays usually included a talking character or 3D prop that encouraged consumers to spend some time with the display. Recently, marketers behind the new futuristic flick Repo Men, starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, have combined interactive posters with the latest up and coming trend in advertising; mobile marketing.
Red Laser recently released an iPhone app that turns your iPhone into a bar code scanning device. For $1.99 iPhone users can scan all sorts of products and instantly pull up product information. The technology, which may just become the grocery shopper’s new best friend, is also being closely watched by the advertising community at large.
Repo Men couldn’t be a better product to test out this mobile marketing technology. Centered around a futuristic world where organs are man made machines, complete with barcodes, the movie follows repo men as they scour cities to reclaim debted merchandise. One of the movies marketing campaigns, available in 15 U.S. cities, features 30,000 movie posters with working barcodes that consumers can scan using their iPhone. The barcodes unlock tons of hidden content including brochures for the artificial organs.
Although the technology is not yet widely used in the U.S., the trendy appeal and low price of the app have helped create buzz around the campaign that Repo Men hopes will pay off at the box office.
