Schlock horror! Hell rediscovers marketing mojo with interactive zombie flick
Pizza and horror movies have always gone pretty well together. And while there have been plenty of classic zombie flicks over the years, not one of them has featured pizza in the movie itself. Hell Pizza and Christchurch-based filmmakers Little Sister Films decided to change that by creating Deliver Me to Hell, supposedly the world’s first ‘pick a path’ interactive Zombie movie and now a mid-level YouTube sensation.
It’s always risky proposing to have created a world first. And while the interactive YouTube theme has been used often, most notably in the Cannes Lions Grand Prix winning Choose a Different Ending campaign for the Metropolitan Police, it’s hard to imagine anyone else has made an interactive YouTube zombie pizza movie.
Hell director Stu McMullin says it “sets a new standard in target audience engagement and entertainment, and allows Hell to stand out from their monotonous peers”.
“The viewer decides which directions the plot takes, and if they don’t like how the story turns out, they just start again. Unlike other interactive YouTube games all the videos except for the entry point have been set as unlisted and thus inaccessible unless you follow a direct link.” This means that there’s no easy way to skip ahead, and the game has to be played in its entirety, and is rewarded for doing so by going into the draw to become morbidly obese with a year’s supply of Hell pizza.
He says the campaign has struck a chord in New Zealand, but also globally, with over 3,000,000 views on YouTube in the first seven days, making it the 49th most viewed in the world on YouTube.
“Who’d have thought that a small pizza company down here could make such an impact around the world” McMullin says. “It’s bloody brilliant.”
So after a period of neglect, maybe Hell is starting to get its marketing mojo back. And surely the next step is to leverage the success of the movie with a special ‘Braaaaaaaiiiinssss pizza’.
What do you think?