Senior Account Executive

Who doesn’t love Mark Wahlberg? I mean, come on. The actor who morphed himself from Boston street hooligan to leader of the Funky Bunch to Calvin Klein underwear model to Hollywood star who rakes in millions in each film is a fairly loveable guy.

Wahlberg’s new movie, “Broken City,” also stars Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Catherine Zeta-Jones. But the movie isn’t getting much love from the critics. Newsday says “Star-studded but forgettable ‘Broken City’ could use some fixing,” and the Hollywood Reporter says, “Well-cast but unconvincing thriller about corruption in the big city.”

Ouch.

Working in a Cincinnati marketing agency, I enjoy studying the different approaches industries employ in marketing their products. So, I got a kick out of this twist the marketers behind “Broken City” used to promote the film.

Instead of relying on critics to provide a good review they can use in a commercial or thrusting a microphone into the faces of moviegoers as they exit the film to get them saying things like “Oh man, it was, like, awesome!” and then cobbling that into a commercial, the ad for “Broken City” features very quick edits of the movie interspersed with positive opinions from Twitter.

If you’re not paying attention, you don’t even realize the screamingly-large text on the screen even comes from random tweets:  “THERE IS JUST SOMETHING ABOUT MARK WAHLBERG…MARK WAHLBERG IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING…MARK WAHLBERG KICKS ASS…GREAT…ROCKS…OBSESSED…LOVE HIM…MUST SEE…IS IT JANUARY 18 YET?”

I think it’s a clever integration of social media into movie marketing. What do you think?