The film has a spot on the Fox Atomic website, and here users can find a well-organized gateway to photos, trailers and downloads, as well as an extensive backgrounder on the movie and its jungle setting. The site also includes a candid commentary section-- which many Brazilian locals have used to express their outrage at the movie's horrific portrayal of life in their beautiful and diverse country.
The Fox Atomic site also links to the movie's MySpace page. In addition to the standard fare, users will find a character dead poll contest and a template to build a "My Crazy Travel Friends" section on their own MySpace pages.
But the real standout of the campaign is an immersive microsite, accessed by clicking on the MySpace page's banner ad for ParadiseBrazil (referred to as a "hip guide to the wild side of Brazil.") The fictional tourism site serves as a LonelyPlanet-style travel guide, gone macabre. Users can piece together what's really going on in the film through the site's features, like a photo gallery of "meaningless shots" of dead bodies; a webcam of a remote beach (with more dead bodies); lots of missing person alerts and everything anyone ever wanted to know about the black market for human organs.
-- Jodi Harris, managing editor, Entertainment Spot
These days, movie studios are exploring alternative tactics as much if not more than the rest of the marketing industry. And the marketing campaign for "Turistas" is a good example. It pulls out all the guns: MySpace pages, blogs, covert videos on YouTube and a fictional site. "Turistas" leaves no stone unturned.
Granted, as a film, "Turistas" is particularly well-suited for marketing. Lots of scenes with sexy people, mostly-naked, dancing and drinking on a Brazilian beach. And this campaign leverages that well in both the trailer and the MySpace page. Of course, a movie can't be just 120 minutes of sexy people, mostly naked, dancing and drinking on a Brazilian beach. So that's where the organ harvesting twist comes in to ruin a perfectly good beach party. It also makes for a good fictional campaign in the form of a microsite, ParadiseBrazil.com.
This microsite is advertised on the movie's MySpace page in what looks like a standard Brazil travel banner. On the ParadiseBrazil site, we first see the Paradise Brazil web cam. Its a "Blair Witch" creepout that looks quite realistic (although I'd have left out the text graphics). It's a Lonely Planet parallel, only darker. This microsite delves further into the organ harvesting theme, putting up faux articles about the illegal trade of organs in Brazil, fictional tour bus company ads and even links to fake vintage travel advisory films on YouTube. Most of it is done to the point where an average reader could take it for real on first view.
You can't accuse the marketers at Fox Atomic of being lazy. They went to great lengths developing the numerous moving parts of this campaign. I Googled "organ harvesting brazil" and the faux vintage videos on YouTube came up as the number two listing.
IMO, they even could have simplified the campaign a bit more, going with fewer elements. However, I'll concede that when pulling off a joke like a fictional campaign, having extensive content certainly helps authenticate the misdirection. I also felt it was a little inconsistent in terms of how well they concealed the joke of the fictional campaign and its relationship to the actual movie marketing. But it's effective to the point of when I was on the blog and clicked on the Brazil Travel Wiki, which linked to the actual Brazil entry in Wikipedia, initially I wasn't entirely sure if it was another hoax.
As a rule, I refuse to pay money to have the crap scared out of me. But if I were into horror flicks, I think this one would be on my list.
-- Doug Schumacher, president/creative director, Basement, Inc.
I'm pretty comfortable with MySpace. Not only is it an in-demand tool that my clients always ask about, as part of their mix, but I have a 17-year-old son, and the only way to keep an eye on him is to participate in what he is doing, which is spending a significant amount of time on YouTube and MySpace.
Similar to the Bravo hit TV series "BlowOut," Fox Atomic definitely spent a significant amount of time developing not only the MySpace page for Turistas, but several microsites and quite a bit of specialized content. The artwork for the MySpace page was a bit hit and miss. Some of the graphics -- like the Flash player for the trailers, some images and the micro content to rename your top eight friends with the Turista monikers -- were very cool, but then other portions had images and content that seemed very "blown out" or pixilated. I wasn't sure if that was to give the page some authenticity so it looked like "Alex" did it himself, or if it was really a technical problem with modifying the MySpace page (which there can be).
Overall, I had a great time going through Alex's profile. I was interested in the storyline, the great video and image gallery they put together and respected the way that they posted both the positive and negative feedback on the movie from other MySpace members.
I'd be interested in seeing the metrics of how many views, friend requests and other statistics the site collected, and what Fox Atomic had in place for goals for the site, in order to generate film awareness.
I think Fox Atomic had a good plan and utilized MySpace appropriately as a marketing tool.
-- Keith Pape, senior partner/vice president, FrontGate Creative.