Venatus at the Movies

With the summer blockbuster season well and truly upon us we have taken a moment to look back at some of our best film-inspired advertising briefs of the last few months.

With the exclusive UK rights to sell advertising on iconic entertainment sites including Variety and Deadline, we have had the opportunity to create campaigns for some of the best releases of the last six months. The wide range of genres has kept our Creative and Ad Ops team on their toes in our effort to create innovative and engaging ad formats.  

Lion

Skins alumni Dev Patel led an all-star cast in the big screen adaptation of Saroo Brierley’s semi-autobiographical book A Long Way Home. Garnering six Academy Award nominations and the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for Patel, the film was a critical and commercial success.

We worked with Entertainment Film Distributors to promote the film our entertainment sites including Variety Magazine’s online home variety.com. With 17 million unique monthly viewers, advertising on a site dedicated to serving committed entertainment audiences was a fantastic way to connect potential viewers with this beautiful and emotionally charged film.

Sing

Equally heart-warming but with a significantly larger number of sequins, Garth Jennings and Christophe Lourdelet’s animated feature followed a group of anthropomorphic animals finding new opportunities through a singing competition.

Earning $632 million in the box office, the film was advertised on Deadline’s site as part of a targeted campaign that proves the versatility of entertainment sites and apps as an advertising platform in appealing to a range of entertainment demographics.

Split

The nuances of M. Night Shyamalan’s Split presented Venatus’ in-house creative team with an exciting challenge. With James McAvoy playing a character with twenty-three personalities, the options were many but the stakes were high in representing the narrative and topics sensitively.

With custom artwork created for carefully chosen sites in our portfolio including movieweb.com and ranker.com, our Ad Ops team worked round the clock to both optimize the campaign and make sure it was served to appropriate audiences, given the adult themes of the film.

Fast and Furious 8: The Fate of the Furious

We’re pretty pleased about representing this feature during what Deadline have determined to be Universal’s ‘most ambitious worldwide distribution release’ (http://bit.ly/2o4yqCo ). The Fate of the Furious was the studio’s fifth film to gross $1 billion, not to mention the third highest grossing film of 2017, to the best fans in entertainment.

Premium campaigns about the film ran on radaronline.com and whatculture.com, where research provided by our analytics tool revealed preferences for an appreciation of high skill levels and adventure among the audiences. Understanding the passion of our audiences ensures they see content that they will like and that our advertisers and publishers are both benefitting.  

The Lego Batman Movie

Last but certainly not least was the successor to the phenomenally successful The Lego Movie, in which Will Arnett returned as the caped crusader.

This campaign was aimed at a kids audiences so we worked with Warner Bros. to raise the film’s profile with a relevant kids gaming audiences through games.co.uk, agame.com, gamesfreak.net. Ofcom reports that 85% of 5-15 year old play digital games, indicating the affinity between gaming and entertainment from a young age.