My favorite novel ever has now been made in to a movie. Watchmen, the 1987 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is a masterpiece mixing traditional comic book elements

with supplemental fictional documents that add to the series’ backstory, like excerpts of an ex-masked vigilante’s autobiography:

The story of the watchmen take place in an alternative, conterfactual version of 1985. Here, the USA won the Vietnam War beacause of the help from the god-like Dr. Manhattan, and Nixon is still president.

So what does this mean for the different approaches to the marketing of the Watchmen movie?

well, I am happy to see that the comic’s way of using different narrators and diffenrent media (autobiography, correspondance between characters, scientifi articles and newspaper interviews) have been succesfully embraced in online marketing.

3 fictional tv clipshave been made, using the form and aestethics of a typical 1980′s MTV-ish programme or an congressional anti-vigilante propaganda video mimicing the Mccarthyism of the 1950′s.

Furthermore, director Zack Snyder launched a contest, encouraging people the make the own 80′s style tv ad for the Watchmen character Adrian Veidt’s perfume “Nostalgia”. Here are some of the winning entries

Fans making high quality 80′s style commercials for fictional products? Isn’t that the essence of active engagement? And, of course, all this is on the microsite supplemented by customizable social network site skins, widgets, fan banners and extensive background material on the alternative reality of the watchmen.

Watch it. And go read the graphic novel

// Jakob

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Animation, Digital, New Media, Stroke of genius, User Generated Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.