Ep 31 Ryan Reynolds & The Deadpool Method of Marketing
Oh, hi there. I was just enjoying this martini made with Aviation Gin, reflecting on the last 10 years of Pop Culture & Brand Marketing. Sipping on this smooth drinky-poo, I can’t stop thinking of probably the most unexpected pioneer of pop-marketing in the past 10 years.
All hail Ryan Reynolds, actor, comedian, film producer, screenwriter, entrepreneur, and pop-marketer?
Maybe best known for inspiring my 6th year of college with Van Wilder or playing everyone’s favorite "4th wall” breaking, anti-hero Deadpool. What you probably don’t know is that he’s also an exceptionally potent pop-marketer who for the past 6 years has been writing a book on modern marketing methods.
On this special episode of the Pop100, we tell Ryan Reynolds (The Pop-Marketer’s) origin story, breaking down how this Canadian born Hollywood heartthrob went from Blade 3 to Pop-Marketer of the decade.
But before we go all the way back to the beginning, let’s talk about late 2019 when
Aviation Gin sets a new bar in “culture jacking marketing stunts” by drafting off of Peloton’s now-infamous holiday ad that had become a fully-fledged internet debacle with its perceived inauthentic portrayal of a “Peloton Wife”.
In comes, Aviation Gin, which is actually owned by Ryan Reynolds, and not in some celebrity paid spokesperson cheeseball sorta way. He’s an extremely involved owner who spearheads the marketing and promotion of all of his products.
Within 36 hours of Peloton’s dumpster catching fire, Aviation Gin powered by Ryan Reynold’s own production company, Maximum Effort Production, with absolutely no permission from Peloton had tracked down the actress that played the “Peloton Wife”, hired a crew, acquired a location, wrote and produced the now-famous clap-back video launched by a single tweet from Ryan Reynold’s Twitter account. Backed with zero traditional paid media this hijack racked up 10 million YouTube views in a week, as well untold $millions of dollars in global PR coverage from Jimmy Fallon to Good Morning America.
Exercise bike not included. #AviationGin pic.twitter.com/jYHW74h81l
— Ryan Reynolds (@VancityReynolds) December 7, 2019
Hello, World!
In a day, Ryan Reynold’s team had taken all of that pent up negative cultural tension focusing on Peloton and like some kind of magical Marketing judo master, had almost instantly deflated all of the negative public tensions, turning all of that negative energy into a positive emotional connection with a brand with absolutely zero affiliation with Peloton.
You don’t have to take my word for it!
Check out Peloton’s stock over this time period. Commercial catches fire on the internet, stock plunges over $1 billion in value, the day after Ryan Reynold’s Aviation Gin parody follow up vid blows up...Boink, back up and running baby. Hey CEOs, if you don’t think popular culture has an effect on your bottom line…
Focusing on the stunt on its own, it can easily appear as one of those 1 in a million marketing moves, never to be recreated again, the Oreo Dunk in the Dark of 2019.
However...when you spend the many hours researching Ryan Reynolds on the internet as I do, you discover that this isn’t some cosmic marketing hail mary, but just the most recent example of a breed of marketing that Reynold’s and his team have been cooking up for the last 6 years!
I call Reynold’s particular style of pop-marketing the Deadpool Method, named after Rob Liefeld’s comic character that Reynolds famously played in the world’s most profitable R rated movie in history.
Basically, the Deadpool method has 4 parts.
It must leverage or draft from internet culture, either static or fleeting.
Instead of top-down, it travels bottom-up, building steam and gaining cred from cultural gatekeepers before it goes mainstream.
It must Use humor + wit to deliver the killing blow, sometimes to disarming a sting
And finally, the secret ingredient, a dash of meta, a wink to the audience that we know that they know what advertising is. Basically, it’s adopting Deadpool’s ultimate superhero power of his ability to break the 4th wall between the imaginary world of the comic and our own reality.
To understand how The Deadpool Method works and exactly how we got to the Aviation Gin Peloton flip, we gotta go back 6 years to where it began.
Yup- I’m talking about the superhero film genre cinderella story of Deadpool.
It’s hard to imagine a world without Deadpool but in 2015, the idea of a Deadpool feature film was…well, it was 100% dead in the water.
The character of Deadpool (portrayed again by Ryan Reynolds) had been poorly utilized in the tragically disappointing 2009’s Wolverine: Origins (yipes) & Ryan Reynold’s superhero prowess was still bruised from starring in the 2011 box office stinker Green Lantern.
To the Hollywood movie executives, the idea of sinking money into a stand-alone Deadpool feature film was unimaginable, let alone a comic book movie with an R rating??
Reynolds saw something special in the character & worked w/ Director Tim Miller to produce 3 minutes of test footage in hope to woo execs into understanding Deadpool’s potential. Though super cool, it did nada to persuade movie execs to invest in the character. So the idea sat there DOA, destined to become the movie that never was.
That is until someone leaked that test footage to the internet. Even though Reynolds or Miller still won’t fess up to the act, the footage somehow found its way to the internet and the internet’s response to the leaked film was so thunderously positive that it literally willed the standalone Deadpool movie back from the dead and into production.
Pause it right here….This is it.
This is the moment where Ryan Reynolds figured out a big part of his marketing equation. He had used the internet as a cheat code, bypassing the traditional red tape of Hollywood by going directly to the source. The audience themselves. This is a bottom-up mentality. Buiding a groundswell that can push an idea up and out into the mainstream.
But there was still a catch. Yes, the Deadpool movie was now greenlit, the budget was extremely low, especially for a superhero flick at around $58 million, therefore the marketing budget was almost non-existent compared to behemoth budgets of MCU movies.
At this point, Reynolds was fully committed to seeing this project succeed, so he embedded himself within Fox’s marketing team. This is extremely rare, even though we continuously see that the more the actor is personally involved in the promotion of the movie, the greater the anticipation becomes.
It was here that Ryan is introduced to this guy, George Dewey, the SVP Head to Digital Marketing for Fox. George had almost 20 years of experience as a creative at McCann a global and legendary ad agency before he jumped to the brand side of the business.
Side note, Dewey is now currently the President of Reynold’s own production company, Maximum Effort Productions which has been in charge of all of the Aviation Gin work, including the Peloton ad but way more on that in our next episode.
It was this union, this combination of Ryan Reynolds’s new understanding of the relationship of celebrity & fandom on the internet and Dewey’s deep understanding of how ideas work and are brought to life that created the spark needed for the Deadpool Method to be born.
The big idea for the Deadpool marketing campaign was to take Deadpool’s character outside of his imaginary reality & inject him directly into internet culture, almost infecting the internet with a kind of Deadpool influenza.
It became clear that Deadpool’s campaign acted more like a virus, spreading through popular culture via the internet and the social feed than the traditional carpet bombing of traditional movie marketing campaigns.
A costume reveal that was a throwback reference to Bert Reynold’s iconic Playgirl centerfold.
Announcing the much-anticipated R rating by unleashing Deadpool on AC Slater.
Even Betty White wasn’t safe from Deadpool’s contamination of the popular culture.
To take full advantage of this idea of a Deadpool infection, they made an extra Deadpool suit for Ryan Reynold, so he could have one on him if any opportunity showed itself, Reynolds could just pop on the suit and roll.
Even traditional advertising like out of home had been tainted. This billboard went up in 1 spot in Hollywood, CA, yet blew up on the internet. See the flip here? This billboard showed up in a single location, but the spread of it on the internet made the outdoor buy seem like it was everywhere.
The marketing team very much took over the calendar. This is very much a PR move more than traditional marketing, Deadpool invaded Valentine’s Day, Australia Day, even Chinese New Year (even though the movie had been banned in China).
Even Christmas, or maybe especially Christmas wasn’t safe, as they seemingly took over the internet for 12 days with 12 different stunts and over 3 hours of content spreading from People to Deviant Art, leading up and building anticipation for the trailer release.
This is also where the now legendary faux Hugh Jackman Twitter beef began. The schtick was that Ryan Reynolds was still pissed at Hugh Jackman for ruining the Deadpool character in the Wolverine Origin movie and this friendly warfare would later seep into the next Wolverine movie, into Deadpool 2 and even jump over into Aviation Gin marketing which again we’ll talk more about next episode.
Maybe my favorite marketing tactic in the last decade occurred during the DVD release wherein a partnership with Wal-Mart, Deadpool hacked maybe the most underrated and well-known billboards in the country. Wal-Mart’s $5 DVD rack. Overnight, the rack had completely been switched out with Deadpool movies, lampooning famous DVD covers from Office Space to The Good Bad & the Ugly.
So what were the results of the first go at the “Deadpool method” of marketing?
It also became the most profitable R rated movie in the world at that time.
That’s a 13x return on an R rated movie about comic books that accomplished it with relatively no budget or traditional promotional resources? And that’s why Deadpool didn’t just change how movies were marketed, but how everything was marketed.
dammit, daddy’s out of his yum yum juice. Sorry for the cliff hanger but this is just going to have to be a 2 parter.
So after the staggering success of Deadpool 1, can The Deadpool Method be repeated? Will Reynolds & Dewey be able to scale the Deadpool Method as it goes from no budget to almost endless resources for Deadpool 2?
And the biggest question of all...can the Deadpool Method work outside of Deadpool and even outside of movies & entertainment?
You’ll just have to wait until the next decade to find out true believers.
I’m Joe Cox, The Pop Marketer, this is the Pop100, hit up pop-marketer.com and join my newsletter to get even more tales of Pop Culture & Brand mutant baby ideas and activations and even learn how to hone your skills as a pop-marketer yourself.
Hoping you all had an amazing holiday with whoever you call family and friends,
cheers from us here at Pop-Marketer and Happy New Year you filthy animals!