From Heineken to the Olympics, the producers of the 23rd Bond movie have exploited every possible brand connection.
When Skyfall, the 23rd entry in the James Bond series, finally hits UK screens on Friday, the British public will be divided into two factions: those planning to see it, and those assuming it had been out months ago. Even by the unsubtle standards of studio tentpoles, the marketing push for Skyfall has been a long-haul assault, stretching far beyond the standard (if especially ubiquitous) bus-side billboards, and trailers that have been on rotation since the spring.
Though not a man averse to material pleasures, Bond himself might balk at the amount of promotional tie-ins being attached to his name this time around. The new film raises the bar for onscreen product placement, from 007's Tom Ford-tailored suits to Q's Sony Vaio hardware, as well as offscreen alliances ranging from Coke Zero to perfume retailers. (Yes, if you've always wanted to smell like Bond – presumably not after an intense chase sequence – the option is yours.) His new tipple of choice, Heineken, has proved an ongoing sticking point with fans, particularly after a big-budget ad that actually roped Daniel Craig into the action.
However, with the Dutch beer having stumped up over £28m for the privilege of seeing Bond sip from a green bottle in an early scene – coolly covering almost a third of the film's estimated £93.7m ($150m) production budget in the process – the producers are willing to endure that indignity. Craig himself has been a diplomatic spokesman on the issue, acknowledging that their reliance on brand associations is "unfortunate," before countering: "This movie costs a lot of money to make [and] nearly as much again to promote, so we go where we can."
That quote is about as close as we're going to get to learning the film's actual marketing budget, given Sony Pictures International's customary reluctance to divulge such details. It would be a grey area in any case, since it's more difficult than usual to tell where this film's marketing begins and ends – particularly in this year of the Bond films' golden anniversary, when any number of external forces are collaborating to sanctify the franchise as a great British institution. 007 practically received a knighthood in his amiably goofy skit with the Queen in July's Olympic opening ceremony – a stunt that may not have had Skyfall's enigmatic name anywhere on it, but pointedly raised awareness of the agent's return to a global audience of a billion.
Indeed, while few of Bond's brands of choice – the venerable Aston Martin notwithstanding – are British, much of the marketing has worked towards underlining his UK heritage. Most prominent in this regard is a joint campaign with Visit Britain, which will be using the film to hawk British tourism to international audiences through viral and print advertising, as well as its first ever cinema ad, all united under the slogan "Bond is Great … Britain."
That's hardly an incidental affiliation for a film that, unusually for latter-day 007 entries, was largely shot on home soil in the wake of budget cuts at MGM, which filed for bankruptcy in 2010: climactic scenes may take place in London and the Highlands, but keen-eyed Londoners will also notice the capital doubling for Shanghai elsewhere. It may not look it, but the high-gloss, name-heavy Skyfall came in significantly cheaper than 2008's £125m Quantum of Solace.
The budget may be lower this time around, but the stakes are arguably higher. With a UK gross of almost £51m and a global total of around £369m, Quantum of Solace fell short of the numbers attained by the series' first Craig-led outing, Casino Royale, in 2006. It was far from a flop, but it disappointingly failed to build on its predecessor's gutsy brand reinvention – except, that is, in China, where it significantly outpaced the previous film. Industry journalist Ian Sandwell, who recently studied the film's release strategy for trade magazine Screen International, describes the film's Shanghai-set sequences as the film's "ace in the pack": given the vast Chinese market's sympathy toward blockbusters with local involvement, the decision to locate a major stretch of Skyfall's action there is no accident.
With Skyfall looking to right the ship and exceed Casino Royale's global gross, the marketing materials haven't taken many chances, with posters chiefly highlighting the 007 brand and not bothering to name its starrier-than-usual cast or its unusually A-list director Sam Mendes, the first Oscar-winner to helm a Bond film. Sandwell believes this focus on fundamentals is the right approach: "This could be a reaction to the perception of the Craig era to date, where perhaps the grittiness might have attracted the Bourne fans, yet alienated the Bond diehards. Skyfall's marketing has primarily been aimed at reassuring the traditional audience that they haven't been forgotten."
So far, Skyfall is tracking well enough to suggest that the approach has paid off, buoyed by one factor the marketing men couldn't control: the overwhelmingly positive reviews that greeted its first screening nearly two weeks ago, which had some excitable journalists even predicting Oscar glory. The Guardian's box office expert, Charles Gant, tweeted a prediction that the film will top Casino Royale to become the highest-grossing Bond film at the UK box office. That appears to be the expectation in the US too: the number-crunchers at BoxOffice.com are forecasting a Stateside gross of $216m. As it turns out, the lyrics of Adele's theme song (another marketing coup, as the series' first chart hit in years) aren't strictly accurate: the film's standing tall, all right, but the sky isn't falling.
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