How they did it

CAMPAIGN 01

/ Christian Parkes and Neon: the value of showing less

/ How Longlegs made an unseen star the centre of its campaign

Nicolas Cage was in Longlegs. Neon did something unusual with that information: it kept him out of sight. Instead of cutting a trailer around its most recognisable star, the distributor released fragments. Cryptic images arrived without a title. A cipher appeared in a teaser. An outdoor ad offered a phone number that led to a recording of Cage in character. Even the later trailers refused to show his face.

Christian Parkes, then Neon's marketing head, described the choice as respect for horror fans. Let them follow clues rather than explain the mystery before they buy a ticket. The campaign asked its audience to do some work, and the work became part of the pleasure. According to Parkes, Neon spent just under $10 million on the film's release, with roughly 70% of its media money going online and none to television.

Longlegs opened to $22.4 million domestically and became a much bigger theatrical hit than the company had initially projected.

The admirable part is not the hotline or the cipher on its own. It is the discipline behind them. Plenty of campaigns borrow the surface of a mystery, then spoil the answer in the next trailer. Here, the hidden image was the attraction. Fans could talk about the film without feeling they had already seen it.

/ That makes

Longlegs a hard campaign to copy. Its approach worked because the film had a genuinely strange performance worth withholding and an audience ready to hunt for clues. The lesson is not "show nothing". It is to know which part of a film gains power when left unseen.

CAMPAIGN 02 Lara P. Camina and BTeam Pictures: making an arthouse film feel like an event How Sirat travelled beyond the expected audience without pretending to be an easy watch Sirat could have been sold as a prizewinning festival film and left to its usual crowd. BTeam Pictures took a wider bet. In Spain, co-founder Lara P. Camina and her team mapped out several possible audiences, from cinephiles to younger viewers who might respond to its sound, intensity and sense of danger. The artwork put trucks and loudspeakers in the desert. After Cannes, a new poster paired the dancing figures with the line "Dance, scream, explode." Director Oliver Laxe travelled for Q&As, while actor Sergi Lopez appeared on a mainstream late-night show.

None of this promised a gentle night at the cinema. That is what makes the positioning sharp. The campaign gave people a reason to be curious about a difficult film without disguising its force. BTeam also released soon after Cannes, while the festival conversation was still moving. In Spain, its screen count rose from 186 in the first week to 215 in the second, and the film kept playing long after its streaming debut.

The French release offers a useful contrast. Distributor Pyramide changed the artwork and shortened the trailer to stress sensation and music, while its publicists guarded the film's surprises. By the fourth week, it had expanded to about 800 screens in France. Those numbers do not prove which poster or interview sold a ticket. They do show how carefully a release can respond to its market.

What stands out about BTeam's work is the confidence to sell the experience rather than sand away its edges. "Arthouse" need not mean quiet, and a challenging film need not be introduced only to people who already know its director.

CAMPAIGN 03

/ Marian Lee and Netflix: letting local fandom lead

Why Squid Game and Wednesday travelled without becoming the same campaign everywhere A worldwide hit can tempt a company to make one enormous campaign in Los Angeles and translate it later. Netflix CMO Marian Lee has argued for another approach. When Squid Game returned, the Korean team led the global creative strategy. Fans played Red Light, Green Light on the Champs-Elysees in Paris; London hosted a themed rave. The original creative centre stayed close to the show, even as the experiences travelled.

For Wednesday's second season, the marketing became a network of local invitations. A "Doom Tour" took cast and creators across 16 cities. Fans could apply to Nevermore Academy through a quiz and find a hidden route to screenings. Brand partnerships took different shapes in different markets: Thing appeared on Guarana packaging in Brazil, while Nubank made a short film around a new character, Pezinho. In the United States, Wendy's offered a Meal of Misfortune. Each gave fans something to notice, share or take part in beyond watching a trailer.

There is a line between extending a fictional world and covering it in logos. Some of those partnerships feel closer to Wednesday's humour than others. Netflix says the season's pre-release campaign generated three billion impressions on its own social channels, but impressions cannot tell us which activation brought someone to the show. The strongest case for the strategy is creative: it recognises that fandom looks different in Sao Paulo, Paris and Seoul.

What is worth admiring is not simply the size of Netflix's machine. It is the decision to let people nearer a story and its local audiences shape how that story meets the world.

CAMPAIGN 04

/ Apple and Warner Bros.: when the platform joins the campaign

How F1 used race weekends, cinemas and the iPhone itself to find an audience F1 had something most films about sport would envy: a calendar full of people already watching its world. Its first teaser landed during the British Grand Prix, almost a year before the film opened. Apple produced the film; Warner Bros. handled its theatrical release. Together with IMAX, they offered fan-first screenings in 25 locations around the world, with tickets going on sale as the racing season began. The launch was built around the rhythms of the sport rather than a standard countdown to opening day.

Then Apple brought the campaign onto its own devices. Maps highlighted race locations. Wallet carried ticket offers. A trailer in the Apple TV app used iPhone vibrations timed to the sound and movement of a race car. Apple executive Eddy Cue said the team made more than 50 distinct vibration patterns, adapting technology originally developed as an accessibility feature. That is a more interesting use of a platform than simply putting another banner in an app: it lets the phone convey something about the film's subject.

The same reach raises a harder question. A trailer someone chooses to play is an invitation; a prompt inside a tool they use for other things can feel like an interruption.

Marketing Brew reported mixed reactions to the phone integrations. Apple's distribution strength let the film appear across sport, cinemas and devices, but owning a channel does not automatically earn the right to use every inch of it.

What makes this campaign worth watching is that ambition and discomfort sit together. The best of it met racing fans where they already were. The weakest risk was mistaking access to an audience for its attention.

Sources Hollywood Reporter: Neon and Longlegs ↗Screen Daily: Sirat distribution ↗Fast Company: Marian Lee and Netflix ↗Netflix: Wednesday global campaign ↗Marketing Brew: F1 campaign ↗