As I find myself back in the entertainment industry—this time through game development with Leveret Games—it’s reminded me of my all-time favourite campaign from my days running Leet Digital, my digital agency.
One of my good friends’ wives worked at an events company that had Fox Movies as a client. Through the classic “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”, I ended up picking up a little bit of work with Fox Movies—and that included this campaign.
It’s a bit sad, because I don’t see brands taking this kind of risk as often anymore. At the time, Fox Movies was promoting the DVD release of The Martian (great movie, by the way).
If you haven’t seen it (and I recommend you do), it stars Matt Damon, who gets stranded on Mars. The story follows his survival—and the global effort to bring him back home.
“Bring him home” became the theme of the campaign.
The idea was that one of the potential Australian astronauts for a future mission to Mars, Josh Richards, would be locked inside a specially built habitat at Circular Quay. The habitat had a clear glass front so you could see straight in—and he’d be living in there for a full week. And I mean living in there: eating, sleeping, shitting and showering.
It was an experiential activation, but it also had a digital component. Without giving any spoilers away, in the movie Matt Damon is streaming back to Earth via GoPros, so the idea was that we replicate this by fitting a couple of GoPros in the habitat and streaming this online for people to watch.
The livestream was supported by a social media campaign and microsite where people could engage with content from the movie and even purchase the DVD.
Livestreaming on things like Twitch and YouTube is super easy now but boy oh boy was it pretty limited back during this time.
As Fox is a big scary beast owned by Disney I won’t share specifics on the results but it was a great success. And rather than read about it, check out the campaign sizzle reel (with numbers greyed out of course):
Almost feels like we were ahead of the times with livestreaming :D