“Barbie” mania swept the marketing world last year when Warner Bros. Pictures’ campaign for the summer blockbuster became a viral sensation, bringing over 100 brand partners, including licensed consumer products, to Barbie Land. Now, the Juice is loose on Madison Avenue as the film studio took cues from its “Barbie” wins in its campaign for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which hit theaters today.

While studios partnering with brands for film rollouts isn’t new, “Barbie” sparked a trend, leading to increased demand for advertisers to play a more intimate and larger role in campaigns for new releases, according to Dana Nussbaum, executive VP of worldwide marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures. The “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” campaign featured 35 brand partners, the studio’s largest partner campaign for a film when excluding product licensees for “Barbie.” Marketing partners for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” represent more than double the promotional value of the “Barbie” partners, according to Warner Bros., and Nussbaum said the enthusiasm from brands to invest more deeply into the horror-comedy film’s world, in some cases in surprising ways, was an exciting new development.

“The days of putting a logo on something or slapping in product placement that feels out of place—those days are over,” said Nussbaum. “Audiences are too smart and too sophisticated for that. No one wants that. What they want is something that feels like a value add and feels like you’re actually creating something. So it’s not about bolting on these partnerships, but building them together.”

Look back: Inside the “Barbie” marketing machine

Brands haunt the afterlife

Each of the top “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” brand partners found ways to integrate their brands into scenes or locations from the movie, and the film’s creators were part of every decision, Nussbaum said. A collaboration with Procter & Gamble’s Secret deodorant brand was unexpected, but the brand embraced the pus and boils of living in the afterlife. Famed costume designer Colleen Atwood hand-picked the actors’ looks.

The film’s creators, including its monster makeup artist Neal Scanlan, worked with CarMax to construct an afterlife car dealership called BeetleMax, which was built on the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” set in London. The spot, which was approved by Director Tim Burton and the filmmaking team, finds a family in a scary place to be shopping for cars. They become possessed into singing a rendition of “Day-O,” and are surrounded by spooky salespeople pushing “scary deals.”

The spot was an exercise in expressing CarMax’s messaging in new ways, said Anne Marie Hite, senior VP, group creative director at CarMax’s creative partner The Martin Agency. CarMax wanted to highlight its coverage of flood damage, Hite said, so the creative team came up with the idea of featuring a car covered in seaweed and a starfish after a run-in with the ocean, featuring a sign that read, “Flood damage guaranteed!”

Conversely, the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” filmmakers requested the iconic song from the original 1988 “Beetlejuice” be featured in the ad and helped craft the characterization of the shrunken head beings known as Shrinkers as well as a zombie character that appears to have died via python (the character also appears in the film).

“The BeetleMax world is the first thing we’ve ever done that’s been really fantastical—I think the most fantastical thing we’ve done since I’ve been on the CarMax business is we had an alpaca in a convertible once,” said Hite, adding that the input from all collaborators is what enabled them to produce a spot that feels more like a scene from the film rather than an ad.

Progressive’s cast of insurance experts also found themselves in the world of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” tasked with protecting the owners of the iconic Deetz house from sandworms and a near encounter with Beetlejuice himself.

Progressive also partnered with Warner Bros. on last year’s “Barbie,” sending Flo and the team to the doll’s dream house in a co-branded spot. 

“Although the ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ integration differs from our work on ‘Barbie,’ the goal remains the same: to drive reach, affinity and consideration with new audiences in ways we couldn’t otherwise access them,” Sade Balogun, senior business leader, brand experience at Progressive told Ad Age via email. Balogun noted that in addition to the co-branded spot, “Barbie” presented the opportunity to utilize Progressive’s characters, Flo and Jaime, in person for the first time at the film’s pink carpet premiere. 

“Their pink carpet appearance garnered unprecedented amounts of positive earned media, resulting in the duo’s inclusion in fashion roundups, [and an] increase in social conversation from both media and fans who were excited to see the two in real life,” said Balogun. “Flo was even pictured with Trixie Mattel further increasing her awareness and cache with new audiences.”

Working in the world of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” will also help Progressive “reach a more diverse set of people that our current marketing ecosystem may not be able to,” said Balogun. 

Reaching new audiences was also a top priority for the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” team, whose early discussions were guided by “how to do right by the nostalgic audience, but also show younger audiences that there’s something completely fresh and relevant, and that the film really speaks to a new generation in a really specific way,” said Nussbaum.

Juggling generations

Gen Z has been a common target for film campaigns this year, with studio marketers fighting consumers’ impulse to wait for movies to hit streaming. The “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” team was tasked with hyping the franchise and actors—already popular with older generations—for younger consumers, a central focus of the film’s strategy.

“For Gen Z, the tendency to want to skip advertising and make the decisions for themselves is something we leaned into,” said Christian Davin, executive VP of worldwide marketing, Warner Bros. Pictures. The “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” campaign again took a note from “Barbie” in generating some of its buzz in ways that didn’t feel like traditional marketing.

Also read: 5 Gen Z trends for brands to watch

Mirroring the social media fascination for Margot Robbie’s tributes to classic Barbie apparel in the press tour for “Barbie,”  “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” star Jenna Ortega curated outfits for the film’s promotional tour that paid homage to costumes from the original film. Davin said the earned media and social following for Ortega’s looks have been key in engaging Gen Z.

Another primary strategy for reaching Gen Z has been allowing fans to take part in the marketing through interactive activations on TikTok and Roblox, as well as an app that will generate a corpse-like face for users.

“In today’s day and age, ownership is a really important thing,” said Davin, pointing to fans championing emerging artists such as Chappell Roan and the pride they take in their success. “As we were thinking about ‘Beetlejuice,’ you want to set the campaign up for success by stoking the embers of fandom, but you’re never quite sure if it’s going to catch fire. But when it does catch fire, you want to fan those flames.”

Nussbaum added that “you can plan a lot of a campaign, but then you put it in the hands of the fans and the audiences, and they will inform what the next steps are,” she said. “We really learned that on ‘Barbie’—there were definitely tons of places where we were completely surprised, whether it was how people reacted to the Progressive spots and Flo, or how people reacted to a press tour being turned into this sort of interactive fashion show.”

For example, Warner Bros. partnered with TikTok to create a “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” hub that collects both Warner Bros.’ marketing assets as well as fan-created content, editorial content and the ability to purchase tickets in the app. 

Nussbaum said the TikTok hub ended up pairing perfectly with an extensive partnership with Coca-Cola’s Fanta, which included a custom flavor, co-branded cans and in-person and virtual immersive activations. Nussbaum said that social media users took to posting about their hunts for cans featuring the face of Ortega’s character Astrid Deetz.

But Ortega’s role in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” was not necessarily an automatic draw for Gen Z viewers. Davin said the star of Netflix’s “Wednesday” has a fanbase that skews more female, so specific activations were set up to appeal to young male viewers. 

Davin pointed to a series of content created with the film’s titular star Michael Keaton, who created TikTok content, a video with tips for this year’s fantasy football draft and a spoof on the popular YouTube series “Hot Ones” called “Not Ones.”

And “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” also created a large activation in Roblox called “Beetlejuice: Escape the Afterlife.” The virtual world, set in a gamified version of the miniature town featured in the franchise’s films, allows users to purchase real-life movie tickets within Roblox at a Fandango-branded hub, a first for the platform.

Film marketing has been rapidly evolving, according to Davin, especially since the early years of the pandemic, with fans championing the return of favorite franchises and platforms such as TikTok and Roblox playing critical roles in fan engagement.

The marketer said the success of the campaigns for “Barbie” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” exemplifies a new age of brands and fans joining film studios in building marketing together rather than just passive ads.

“Personalization is becoming more and more important to marketing in general, and I think particularly for this film,” echoed Nussbaum. “‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ was really about not creating a campaign and serving it up to audiences, but building it with audiences.”