Deadpool Marketing and Demographics

How Would You Advertise a Media Product?

'Ooh I'll make a TV advert'
                        - Mr Sir

Social Media accounts, with regular posts.
Merchandise - official and fast food tie-ins.
Magazines.

 

What Da Deadpool Doin?

Traditional advertising:
Posters
Billboards
Jokes in the marketing working alongside the tone of the jokes in the film.
Like making posters which are blatantly advertising the film as a completely different genre to what it actually is. Which works in this context because the marketing is so widespread that you'd have to be living under Dwayne Johnson to not see some other marketing elsewhere and thus get the joke very easily.

Digital advertising:
Social Media posts
A weird amount of back and forth between Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman for some reason.
A Tinder account for some reason.
'Leaked' script page with Deadpool annotations.
A 'very childish' (Knight phrasing) venn diagram.
Various TV or online adverts which are also a bunch of jokes in themselves. It's all very el big funni.
There's various parodies of things.
Collaborations with all those American late night shows that are all basically the same show and are unaccountably very popular.
This marketing is spread far and wide across various platforms and on various people's accounts.

All of this is reflective of the humour and the style of the film itself. This time around it worked. Other times have been far less successful, like Suicide Squad (yeah that first one).
Coherence between advertising and the actual product is very important.

Summary:

Deadpool's marketing was very broad and perfectly in line with the comedic, sarcastic and self-aware tone of the film itself. Only a small amount of the film's trailer advertising even vaguely resembled your stereotypical trailer, everything else was incredibly tongue-in-cheek, self-aware both in traditional and online marketing aspects. Even the traditional marketing was comical, with posters being designed in the style of a completely different genre and other amusing misadventures. The digital advertising was even more off-the-wall, with various social media campaigns and a load of back-and-forth between Ryan Reynolds (or one singular Ryan Reynold, according to the PowerPoint) and Hugh Jackman, for some reason, even though he's not even in this film. With that said, the fact this is as random as it is is somewhat comparable to the comical nature of this marketing campaign as well as the franchise as a whole.

Imagine these are formatted in a nice way.

 

 

Audience Profile Analysis For Deadpool:

The film being American largely influences some of these statistics, with lots of American people being fans of comic books, superheroes and/or any of their respective film genres. The viewing statistics also somewhat mirror the population of the country. The cast being largely white also may lower the popularity - if Black Panther taught us anything it's that legitimate racial dramas do draw in more of the minorities about which they center. This is very much not a legitimate racial drama.

On no real basis whatsoever, I imagine young men are statistically more likely to enjoy the low-brow humour present in the film. Also the character's past appearances were in stereotypically more male-targeted products. People might also like Ryan Reynolds, be this for attractiveness or admiration in other ways. Also the mass appeal of the MCU and such may have made this significantly more mainstream than it may have been in the past.

Films of this kind all have similar shares of the C1 audience, around the high 30s% range (Deadpool having 38%).

This is probably due to this demographic having the most free time and disposable income while not having moved into the upper middle class area in which you are probably less likely to enjoy the low-brow humour and may even be critical of superhero comic book movies in general.

In terms of age, the film's 15 rating keeps the viewing figures above this area, with the majority being in the mid-late 20s, the area in which people are most likely to also have the most free time and enjoyment of the themes. The film being based on a comic is also a factor in appealing to the younger filmgoers. The character being introduced in 1991 could introduce nostalgia for some. They also use social media a lot, where most of the marketing took place.