Brand: Universal Pictures
Category: Case study
Agency: Hyper
Region: US, UK, Spain, Scandinavia & Other markets
Timeline: 20 February 2009 to end of March 2009

Background
There is a huge opportunity to entertain the audience where there is no other media format available, and fill the downtime with rich interactive experiences. To promote the launch of the movie The Unborn, Hyper on behalf of Universal Pictures approached Golden Gekko to develop an iPhone application.

The movie industry has a great heritage of using outdoor to promote new movies. The design methodology that goes into creating a billboard poster is built on how the consumer should read the imagery to ‘buy in’ to the film bring promoted. The Unborn app builds on this heritage, therefore tying into the consumer’s familiarity with this ATL imagery to act as the launch pad for their user journey.

Execution
With this in mind, Hyper and Golden Gekko developed and launched the first ‘mobile interactive movie trailer’ for Universal Pictures. Over ground, Underground, in the middle of the Atlantic... the content is in the handset to play with. The navigation toolbar is truly virtual and a first step towards mobile’s ability to build on intuitive engagement.

OK. It does require an iPhone or iPod Touch...

Explore ‘The Unborn’ poster on the iPhone to find hidden content within active areas of the imagery, and discover the hidden menace that will come to haunt you.

Content featured includes:
Interactive movie poster – interact with the poster image to uncover hidden content

• ‘The Unborn’ trailer – high quality video trailer
• Unknown caller – a phone call from an unknown caller
• Movie clips – high quality video clips from ‘The Unborn’
• Movie synopsis
• Movie production notes
• Image gallery

The iPhone application was developed in less than 3 weeks to make the premier of the movie. Thanks to great support from Apple it was approved and launched right in time for the premier.

Results
The Unborn iphone application was launched 20 February 2009 and went straight to the top 10 most downloaded free applications on the iTunes App Store and stayed there 2 weeks in a row without any promotions. The Apple iTunes team liked it so much that they recommended it as one of the hot applications of the week and Universal Pictures were so happy with the success that they are now integrating mobile into the overall marketing strategy for the remainder of 2009. A lot more interesting things to come...

The application can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/ape524