Borat: the character and the brand
This is very upsetting. For the past five years I've been watching Borat on the Ali G show and enjoying it thoroughly. It felt great to introduce all my friends to Borat over the years. It was great to see their initial reaction and then explain the whole idea behind it to them. Borat was all mine, now everyone knows about Borat and it's disappointing me. I can't walk down Commonwealth without hearing eight different Borat impressions, all of which are a lot worse than my impression.
So how did Borat get to this level? How did he gain this level of awareness? Sasha Baron Cohen (the actor that plays Borat) and his people absolutely exploited new advertising arenas. With the success of myspace, they created a myspace page for Borat (http://www.myspace.com/borat) that was visited millions of times and he has more than 326,000 myspace friends. He is a made up character. Mickey Mouse has his own myspace page and he only has 3000 fans. BORAT is a character, he is made up, but people love this. How cool is it to be able to say that you're one of Borat's friends? Very cool, apparently.
The other network the Borat people used to create his brand and awareness is YouTube. Fox Studios and Sasha Baron Cohen's company combined to leak teasers and other videos of Borat on youtube. They themselves put these videos on youtube for the hope that they are watched and e-mailed and linked. They succeeded with that tactic.
The Borat movie came in first in the Box Office in its first weekend out. It brought in $29 million, the second most ever by a movie opening in less than 900 theatres. They took the Borat character and they made him real. Using college-user friendly myspace and youtube, they found the right avenues to create awareness and they succeeded.
I hope to see others try new avenues to create awareness, because simply advertising on tv and in print simply don't do it for me anymore.
- Daniil
posted by Brand007 @ 4:24 PM
3 Comments:
I know exactly what you mean. I knew about Borat long before he was widely known by everyone. Suddenly he exploded into fame and now everyone claims to be his favorite fan!
I do attribute some of his fame to the internet, such as Myspace and youtube as you mentioned. But I think the main ingredient to his success was starting off small and letting the viewers do the advertising. He first started in the UK, then discretely brought it over to the US. Not many people knew about Ali G when it first appeared on HBO, but those who did loved it. This small cult-like following then spread the word to others. Slowly the loyal fan base expanded and before you knew it people were already anxious for the movie.
This was an excellent strategy. If you think about it, not much traditional advertising was done for the movie. The first trailer I saw for Borat was only a few months before the movie actually debuted. Sacha knew from the start that the success in the UK would translate to success in the US. He knew the people would love it and that the fan base would multiply largely from word of mouth.
I can't agree with you more. I was totally oblivious to Borat untill a couple months ago when I heard a movie was comming out. Since that day all I hear from people are impersonations of borat or friends showing me clips on youtube.
Its amazing how much buzz can be created about a movie by using sites such as youtube and myspace.
I can see that sites such as these are going to be a great way of generating buzz.
I also agree with you. I'm from the U.K. and I thought I was special when I was the only person who knew who he was. When he came over to the US, I felt pride in the fact that I had to explain a couple of his jokes to others. However, I'm not sure if I agree with John Lewis. I don't think it was a very smart move to dive right into a movie after only being out in the US for a year or so. Many of the early adopters of the Ali G Show felt betrayed by his move to go into movies because it made him seem more commercial because now everyone would know who he was and there would be nothing special about him.
I personally haven't seen the movie yet, but my friends tell me that he reuses a lot of the same jokes and ideas from his show. I think he has lost a lot of his original fan base because of this move. He has, however, gained a huge market share, but I think his brand equity has been destroyed and he will eventually become a fad that will die down in couple months.
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