We explore some of the oddest movie related corporate marketing campaigns from Darth Vader’s cough sweet ads to Winston Wolfe’s contents insurance callouts.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #49.
To date, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is the highest grossing 1980s movie at the worldwide box office. Unlike most of the rest of the top ten, it’s also blessedly free of sequels, prequels, spin offs and other franchise instalments. Yet it’d be remiss to say there’s been no second life for the film: its title character has made a fair few commercial appearances.
While Steven Spielberg’s 1982 movie was a commercial phenomenon at the time – with, it should be pointed out, no shortage of attendant merchandise (including, famously, a terrible and over-produced video game that ended up in landfill) – a major ‘return’ of E.T. came in 1999, when British telecoms giant BT revamped its mass-marketing campaign with new communication technology at its centre.
For most of the 1990s, we heard the unmistakeable voice of the mighty Bob Hoskins telling us “it’s good to talk” in BT adverts. But following successful negotiations with Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment, the company secured E.T. as a mascot at the turn of the millennium.
In a press release announcing the deal, BT’s then-head of marketing communications Tim Evans said: “We want E.T. to show how easy the technology is to use. […] If E.T. can use it, anybody can. He brings out the child in all of us.”
Directed by Paul Weiland (he of Bernard And The Genie and City Slickers II: The Legend Of Curly’s Gold), the first 60-second TV spot premiered on UK TV in 1999, with E.T. and a bunch of his mates building a ramshackle comms tower near the Millennium Dome and broadcasting BT’s slogan to every computer and mobile screen in the world. If it weren’t an advert, it would look a bit like an invasion-centric sequel.
E.T. is far from the only character drafted in to advertise products, but he’s the ideal example of marketers tapping into pop culture – as the title character of one of the most beloved blockbusters of the last 50 years, he comes with instant recognition and existing appeal.
That’s more than you can guarantee for most celebrities or new characters in these polarised and polarising times. And he doesn’t pull down much of a payday from those ads either. That aside, the leap from ‘phone home’ to telecoms is a more natural one than some we’ve seen in the past 25 years…
Quick fix
Despite building a loose shared universe, Quentin Tarantino is no more likely to make a Pulp Fiction sequel than Spielberg is to revisit E.T. And yet somewhere on the opposite end of the scale to BT’s campaign is the longer-running Direct Line insurance adverts in which Harvey Keitel reprises his role as Winston ‘The Wolf’ Wolfe.
In the 1994 film, Keitel makes a big impression as the tux-wearing, quick-witted fixer who helps Jules and Vincent after an unfortunate head-sploding incident in their car. The Wolf covers up crimes, disposes of corpses, and somehow makes 30-minute drives in 10 minutes.
Naturally, the marketing bods at Direct Line felt this was the perfect character to build a £40 million campaign around, as the Wolf attends domestic accidents, car breakdowns, and other problems.
This raised eyebrows internally at Direct Line too, but the idea was to rebrand the company as a quick and effective problem-solver. Keitel reprises his role in various adverts, all of which end on a snatch of Misirlou by Dick Dale, featured in the film’s famous soundtrack.
More surprisingly, a lot of them reference Pulp Fiction’s explosively profane dialogue too – one ad has the Wolf tackling a messy baking accident with a plush toy called Roger and ends on the (admittedly brilliant) Tarantino-inspired wordplay: “That gives us 40 minutes to get the fudge out of Rodge.”
You would think there’d be clear-blue water between a U-certificate alien and a mafia cleaner from an 18-certificate crime movie. Yes, it completely subverts the usual endorsement profile of a trusted, upstanding figure, but leans more upon pop culture associations. As someone else might put it, “just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character.”
And although E.T. was saying “email and text home too” in 1999, it’s the evolution of the internet and social media that’s fed this trend. Adverts are still a mainstay of linear TV broadcasting, but the watercooler effect has gone online and viral.
Marketers are always courting online reaction too – alongside the TV adverts, Direct Line also produced an assortment of how-to videos with Keitel as the Wolf for its website, with subjects ranging from saving money on car insurance to tying a tie and ironing a shirt.
The company’s restructuring and service improvements undoubtedly did more to turn its fortunes around in the 2010s than the ads, but they still ran until 2020. Whether people were tweeting about contents insurance or asking what the hell Keitel was playing at, pop culture proved lucrative for the firm.
Character study
In 2021, Born Licensing published a white paper called ‘A Case For Characters’ with research showing that 38% of the public trust fictional characters more than the actors associated with them or any other real-life celebrities. This might be a desirable angle for a company that professes itself “the only licensing agent in the world solely focused on the licensing of characters in advertising”, but ad trends would seem to point that way.
On the communications front, Sky Broadband has made the most of animated film tie-in promotions, ranging from spots assembled out of video toolkits provided by the studios, to more elaborate bespoke animated spots with characters (and no returning voice artists) from whatever Pixar, DreamWorks, or Illumination film is out in cinemas at the time.
More recently, the Minions from Despicable Me seem to have become Sky Broadband’s main mascots, after a promotion tied to the delayed Minions: Rise Of Gru overran during global lockdowns and even after the film was released.
On balance, animated characters are probably even less reliable thought-leaders in consumer advice than mob fixers, but those adverts keep coming. Particularly where they involve either children’s characters or nostalgic favourites, these campaigns are more attention-grabbing than they are relevant to the services being offered.
For instance, one of Born Licensing’s biggest coups was its 2017 ‘Epic Lift’ TV ad for the price-comparison site MoneySuperMarket, which brought together Masters Of The Universe characters He-Man and Skeletor in a spoof of Dirty Dancing’s climactic scenes. What any of this has to do with the price of insurance, we don’t know, but it trended on Twitter and seemed to do very well for them.
Even the company’s slogan ‘You’re so MoneySuperMarket’ is paraphrased from “You’re so money” from 1996’s Swingers. And since its popular Masters Of The Universe tie-ins ended (reportedly because rights- holder Mattel was prepping a feature-film revamp that’s still yet to materialise), the company has drafted in Dame Judi Dench for a spy-themed campaign.
We’re sure they’d like us to stress that she definitely isn’t playing M from the James Bond films – the ‘MoneySuperSeven’ are completely unaffiliated with 007, honest. But those ads do just enough when you’re half-watching between TV programmes or before the main attraction in cinemas to prick that memory of watching Dame Judi tell spies what to do in certain very popular British blockbusters.
And never mind what the Minions know about broadband – what the heck does Dame Judi Dench know about saving us money on car insurance?
Adsploitation
Sadly, this divorce of character from context, or media from meaning, seems crucial to the business of movies these days. Particularly as it relates to intellectual property, there’s the sense of everything becoming part of those studio asset kits that agencies use in the Sky adverts – an animated widget that doesn’t necessarily need an actor or an artist behind it if the corporations involved can help it.
It seems this too has progressed in stages. Back in 1999, BT made a point in its press release that Spielberg and Amblin were protective of the character and would have final approval of its E.T. tie-in ads. Conversely, Keitel and Pulp Fiction rights-holder Miramax obviously signed off on the Direct Line ads, but there are no such assurances about Tarantino.
More recently, there’s been a shift towards leveraging online fandoms – which are narrowcast but noisily active – to generate views or impressions. Perhaps the nadir of this trend came with the 2020 DieHard car batteries launch, which was teed up with a ‘#DieHardisBack’ hashtag. Across 30 years and four sequels, Bruce Willis frequently did come back as John McClane, so it got chins wagging (and tagging).
All the more disheartening in the wake of Willis’s retirement from acting due to a diagnosis of aphasia and frontotemporal dementia, the woefully directed online advert is an especially depressing hunk of pop-culture bothering. Also roping in original co-stars De’voreaux White (Argyle) and Clarence Gilyard (Theo), it callously divorces all signifiers from anything they ever signified to flog a product whose name sounds like its name.
And troublingly, whether it’s Keitel reprising the Wolf, Willis reprising McClane, or Dench definitely not reprising M, any film-nerd backlash for this sort of thing seems to fall on actors for taking the payday. And there’s little point in this when companies are demonstrating that they can and will separate the recognisable character from any of the people involved in creating it.
The parasocial relationship between consumer and corporation grows ever more troubling in the franchise media age, especially in the light of last year’s industrial action by both writers and actors to secure better pay conditions and rights assurances from the studios. But here, it’s not even the age-old battle of story-selling vs storytelling, so much as stakeholders licensing ‘content’ to boost a bottom line, whether it’s for a belated feature-film sequel or an overlong service industry advert.
Even RoboCop, a film notable for its portrayal of untrammelled capitalism through satirical adverts, has unironically been licensed out by MGM on various occasions. These range from positioning lead character Alex Murphy alongside a Ninja Turtle and a Transformer in Direct Line’s post-Wolfe ‘We’ve Got This’ campaign, to absurdly bringing back Peter Weller to reprise the role especially for a 2019 KFC advert in which RoboCop is the new Colonel Sanders, complete with white wig, glasses, and bolo tie.
Falling down
Adverts are ahead of feature films in the race to the bottom too – the current debates about using late actors’ likenesses in new material without compensation has already been normalised by Gene Kelly breakdancing in Volkswagen adverts, Audrey Hepburn enjoying Galaxy chocolate on a Roman Holiday-like jaunt, or the cast of The Wizard Of Oz winding up in the Emerald City branch of Halifax.
And as we warned you at the start, even E.T. is not immune. Also in 2019, Universal’s owners Comcast used the character again for a Christmassy ‘reunion’ with a grown-up Elliott (Henry Thomas) and his family. Sky Broadband rebadged the ad for UK audiences and other territories followed suit.
Ads like this scratch the same itch as feature-length ‘legacyquels’, but how many times will E.T. be dragged back to Earth to befriend kids and sell phones to the strains of John Williams’s majestic theme song?
Even 40 years on from a ‘canonical’ happy ending, ongoing commercial exploitation means he can come back, but he can never really go home again.
