Bird Watching
If Harry Potter’s involved, something exciting must be happening.
Sure enough, owls were sighted in faraway cyber worlds by tens of thousands of muggles who logged their sightings online. Daily clues were dropped that led to solving a mystery only Harry and his buddies could conjure. Well, maybe — as long as they had a little help from EastWest Creative.
The architects of the other worldly Harry Potter Owl Prowl promotion generated international buzz in advance of Warner Bros.’s May 2002 home-video release of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with an online interactive sweeps.
“There was tremendous excitement around the movie release,” says Jim Wuthrich, VP-worldwide interactive marketing, Warner Bros. “We wanted to capture that excitement and reignite it around the video release.”
The online medium proved the perfect setting, capturing participants average ages eight to 14 for the four-plus week promotion.
“There’s no use fighting it,” says Steve Rotterdam, chief creative officer at EastWest Creative. “The Internet has become the town hall for kids, teens and tweens.”
The program launched in 12 countries and in seven different languages, generating 900,000 registrants worldwide and 1.5 million sweeps entrants.
Leveraging its position within AOL Time Warner, Warner Bros. promoted the 10-day pre-game teasers in print ads in People magazine and features on EXTRA. At Turner Field, on-air live owl sightings appeared during nationally televised Atlanta Braves games and on AOL banners. “I don’t think we could have done it without being part of the AOL Time Warner family,” Wuthrich says, who was online daily monitoring the games progress. “We wouldn’t have been able to afford the amount of cross promotion and significant support we received from the various divisions.”
The pre-game promotions gave no hint that Harry was involved. Ads carried just the words “Who?” and “Where?” It wasn’t until the a live Web cast from the Kings Cross Station in London announced the release of the video that the young wizard’s name was mentioned in connection with the promotion.
Once the sweeps game began, players who correctly answered trivia questions related to the movie were sent off to any one of 90 worldwide partner sites to search for the owls. Those who were successful earned digital download rewards like a Harry Potter bookmark or screen saver.
Ten grand-prize winners headed to London to be among the first to see the second movie, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets that fall. One bonus winner was flown to London during filming for a walk-on role in the movie.
An instant-win pop-up component that ran throughout the game rewarded 17,000 players with all things Harry Potter, including T-shirts, posters, coloring books and postcard books.
The success of the promotion — one of the best selling video/DVD in 2002 — prompted Warner Bros. to ask EastWest Creative to conjure up something magical in advance of the April 2003 release of the videos for Chamber of Secrets.
SUPPORTING CAST
WARNER BROS. ONLINE: WARNER BROS: Mimi Slavin, Mark Horak
EASTWEST CREATIVE: Rose Odeh, Craig Moser, Rebecca Resnick
