Kick-Ass Marketing

The marketing for Kick-Ass was extremely important to the overall success of the film as there were so many different marketing campaigns for this film, from trailers to posters to social media and so on this film has a huge presence on and offline.

This film used a mixture of traditional and innovative types of marketing. Firstly the film crated 4 batches of posters. The first set of posters when placed together created one overall outline of the New York skyline and the title Kick-Ass which served as a collector’s item for fans of the up and coming film. The second batch showed of the superheroes in the film weren’t actually superheroes and reinforced the idea they had no powers which allowed the audience to insight into the film and the characters themselves, this was done through the tag line “I can’t fly. But I can kick your ass”, and so on. All of these posters showed typical iconography of superhero films such as the iconic on top of a building looking at the city making the film typical other genre however the tag line on others showed that this film challenged expectations. Overall all of these posters shoed a youthfulness to them and also showed the four main characters making the audience familiar with the characters instantly.

The film also has three trailers which were the teaser, official and red-band. All of these trailers conformed to the generic conventions of a superhero film as well and break expectations. However these trailers were also seen as misleading as in the official trailer it did not show the gritty aspects of the film whereas the red-band trailer seemed to have over represented the violence and vulgar language used within the film and completely ignored the comedic elements of the film.

However Kick-Ass had a huge presence online, each character had their own Facebook page which meant that the film became much more realistic as the film doe centre around social media, in addition it mean that the audience could get to know the characters and identify with them. There was also a website called I.Will.Kick-Ass.com which was an interactive webpage where people could take a picture of themselves and add accessories to look like a superhero themselves. Online the audience were encouraged to create their own superhero page as their alter ego and play games associated with each character and their skills in the story. There were also many online competitions to win tickets to the film where fans had to dress up as superheroes and show their skills. Overall online Kick-Ass sucked fans in instantly, the film targeted their audiences and interacted with fans in new and crazy ways which meant the audience were immediately focused on the film and the characters.

The marketing of this film was huge and pricy however it was consistent and showed a clear representation of the film and allowed the audience to build up expectations that in ways were met but also broken. Throughout the marketing the audience were introduced and familiarised with characters and narrative plots leading to a huge fan base.