MySpace Launches Promotional Campaign for “High School Musical 3” Today
by
on September 02, 2008,
Today MySpace is launching what is said to be its biggest film promotion campaign to date. The campaign is intended to prepare for successful opening night of the latest Walt Disney Co’s blockbuster franchise “High School Musical 3″. The campaign is intended to market the sequal of the company’s huge television hit to multi-million MySpace audience.
The contest is launched on MySpace today and will run for two months through November 3. During the contest participating high schools will perform various online tasks, including uploading photos and videos and decorating school profiles as well as interact with the movie’s MySpace profile - both online and via text messaging.
The goal of the contest is to find out which of the participating schools has the most “school spirit”. The class that wins in the contest will receive a trip to a Disney theme park where they will have their graduation party. The winning school will also receive a High School Musical celebrity pep rally featuring UK pop star Natasha Bedingfield.
The High School Musical 3 movie itself will debut in theaters on October 24th - so hopefully the contest will help pave the way for success in this case. I think it is especially important since this one is going to be the first Disney movie to have a theatrical sequel - so the stakes are rather high here. I personally tend to believe that this viral promotion campaign on MySpace will be sure to build anticipation for the opening night in the hearts of thousands of school children across the US.
The high school seniors interested in joining are invited to visit High School Musical page on MySpace. Unfortunately, right now the page seems to only redirect visitors to the homepage of the social network but I believe that must mean they are getting ready with the details of the contest and the profile will be back up within a few hours since the contest is supposed to start today.
Everyone else (especially those of us long past high school) can witness this experiment in promoting the film to the social networking audience by actually encouraging group thinking and team building. With the approach described by MySpace and Disney, I think that even those classes participating and never winning will also enjoy the contest at least as a funny and relaxing addition to their daily routine. Besides, the team spirit developed will hardly be not needed for many schools.
I am sure that if this contest succeeds we will soon see further examples of movie producers venturing to the social networking world to prepare for multi-million dollar opening nights.
