American Idol Finale Launches Summer Movie Marketing

By Katey Rich

Did you catch "American Idol" last night? Come on, you weren't just a tiny bit curious about which David would triumph, and how many sappy guest appearances you could tolerate before drinking yourself to sleep? I admit, I'm a very infrequent viewer of the show, but even I couldn't resist tuning in to last night's two-hour finale extravaganza. (Two hours! To announce one winner!) And I caught an onslaught of marketing, not from the usual "American Idol" partners, but from virtually every major movie that's coming out this summer.

I wrote a piece for this month's Film Journal about the creative ways marketers are targeting online audiences. But the one guaranteed place to get to viewers via good old-fashioned TV commercials is "American Idol," which pulls in the kind of broad demographics that usually only the Super Bowl can manage. Thus we saw ads for not only the family-friendly Kung Fu Panda and Get Smart, but the next big superhero movie The Hulk and Mike Myers' anti-PC comedy The Love Guru. Advertisers were smart, too. There were trailers during the commercial breaks, of course, but several stars stopped by the show in person, including Myers and the cast of an R-rated movie that doesn't come out for nearly three more months.

The appearance by Tropic Thunder stars Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. was the cleverest promotion-- they appeared as The Pips under archive footage of Gladys Knight singing "Midnight Train to Georgia"-- even if it wasn't as funny as it should have been. But the subliminal marketing of it was brilliant. There's Black, who's coming up very soon in the family friendly Kung Fu Panda, and Downey, who's wowing audiences as Iron Man even as we speak. Both of these films are from Paramount, which is also distributing Tropic Thunder. Though the title of the August movie was never mentioned, seeing the three of them together is a trigger for those of us aware of the movie, and makes the otherwise uninitiated audience like them as a trio a bit more. Those three names together might not have made sense yesterday, but now when the ads for Tropic Thunder inundate us come July, some small part of us will say "Oh yeah! Those guys who were the Pips!"

The bit itself seemed a little poorly thought out, with not enough jokes and going on way too long, the entire length of the song. Why did Downey periodically wander off the set? Why did Black show up with his pants off at one point? And, seriously, why were the three of them never dancing in sync? But even with a B for execution, the idea gets an A for sheer synergistic brilliance. Check it out below, and if you like, take a look at the original (thanks to Slate's Idolatry for pointing it out) to realize which one of them would have truly been a great Pip. (I'm sure this is not really a mystery.)