2008 Creativity Award Winner: 20th Century Fox: The Simpsons Movie Marketing Campaign

Supersizing seems to be the American solution to selling everything from fast food to SUVs, but in the case of The Simpsons Movie marketing campaign, that strategy proved to be as sweet as the sprinkles on Homer's favorite pink donut. 20th Century Fox, under the leadership of former EVP/global partnerships Lisa Licht (now at Hasbro), knew it had to go big last year when it came to promoting the first family of pop culture's silver screen debut. The most buzzed about components of the campaign included the 7-Eleven effort that transformed 12 stores overnight into real-life Kwik-E-Marts; Burger King's addictive "Simpsonizer" website, created out of Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Equity Marketing; and the JetBlue partnershipthat named the air carrier "The Official Airline of Springfield" and christened one of its fleet the "Woo-hoo, JetBlue!" plane. But Fox didn't stop there. With USA Today, it issued a competition to determine which of the 14 U.S. towns named Springfield was the Springfield (Vermont's, it turned out). And Fox even rolled out a fantastic and fast-selling effort for the cool kids. The studio partnered with Vans and enlisted a team of artists with serious street cred to design Simpsons-themed shoes.Q&A with Lisa Licht, former Executive Vice-President, Global Partnerships, 20th Century Fox; General Manager, Entertainment & Licensing, HasbroWhen you first set out to promote The Simpsons Movie, what was step one? Did you have any previous experiences from which you took inspiration?Licht: This will date me, but when we launched Titanic internationally for Home Entertainment, we made sure that every element of the marketing campaign was bigger and better than anything ever done previously. Huge department stores around the world dressed the outside of their buildings so you felt that you were literally boarding the Titanic. It was unreal. I wanted to recreate that scale. Every element of Simpsons had to be never done before, from the promotions, to the standees in theaters. No one had ever seen anything like it.Compared to other movie launches you've done, can you give us an idea of the scale of this project?Licht: Each executive in promotions works on several movies simultaneously. We had a small team dedicated to The Simpsons Movie. It was the most time-consuming project, as everyone's attention to detail was extremely specific.

2008 Creativity Award Winner: 20th Century Fox: The Simpsons Movie Marketing Campaign

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