Indiana Jones on Seesmic

This weekend, the fourth installment in the Indiana Jones franchise opens in Cannes. The marketing juggernaut has been going for months – a huge part of the main audience for this movie was not even born 19 years ago when the The Last Crusade came out. The web wasn’t there either, so this was the first chance to see Indy being marketed in that space; the Indiana Jones web site has been trickling out exclusive behind the scenes stuff, the blogs have been simmering with anticipation and other online stuff has been rolled out, such as Indy Search in the UK. Use the MS Live search engine and you get the chance to win prizes.

The stars, along with director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas, were busy giving press interviews, being moved from interview to interview, 10 minutes scheduled for each. It’s what happens, they answer a few questions, quite often the same ones, get filmed, have a photo taken and the get rolled onto the next one, a very traditional way of doing PR for the world press. Except in one room in the hotel, it was different. Instead of the BBC or an entertainment magazine, you had a whole bunch of people from Seesmic and the Picture Production Company. The interviews weren’t going to go out through traditional channels (and I include many web properties in this category) but onto a video conversation app, where people spend all day chatting via video. The company founder, Loic Le Meur, writes a little about the day. Right up until the last minute, the team involved was not sure this was going to happen. I’m lucky to know 2 of them a little; Gia and Mike were both concerned that it would fall through somehow but it didn’t, so they got what they came for.

Now, on the one hand, that of the actors etc, this was just another interview to go through. Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf and Karen Allen, they all get asked their questions, roll out the answers and move to the next one. But what was fun was where the questions came from. Some came out of the result of conversations that had been happening on the video app over the last week, others were direct questions from people who were there in the morning and got a chance to record stuff. Yet more came from reporters globally, via Seesmic. Loic links to about 20 of the answers, only a small number. There’s a lot more video, including all the stuff about the set up and running of the interviews, that will hopefully be around later.

The idea is not new, the ‘record your video question’ has been with us a while and has been used fairly successfully on YouTube especially for some of the political debates or for the off marketing campaign. But the execution of this was completely different, using a conversational video tool that gave near real time answers. The set up of he traditional PR machine meant that with only 10 minutes, there was little chance for any real conversation with service users, but there was a little and the conversation about the interviews has continued far after.

Realistically, from the film marketing POV, this has very little impact compared to the numbers that are likely to be seeing a lot of the other stuff. However, the people involved in this who got a question answered, really have been impacted and are likely to spread the word further, such as Jemima Kiss, who wrote in the Guardian about it. The big marketing winner here has to be Seesmic though, who are suddenly getting a lot of PR about being used this way. A great coup for them.

The last word has to go to Gia though, talking about the whole process and her favourite moment, when Cate asnwers the questions of 2 girls.