Media Structure and Practices
Cross-media promotion is the art of media marketing promotion where promotion of a certain product or service targets customers of a related product. Cross-media marketing usually involves two companies that work together to promote a product or a service that will benefit both companies. Disney channel uses cross-media promotion extensively to market its products. It uses movie tie-ins mostly in marketing of its products.
Movie tie-ins is the releasing a product based on a movie, for example, a book, a video game, or a website. The aim of this paper is to research on cross-media promotion of one Disney film and critically reflect on the effects of the same on a global scale. The paper will focus on the cross-media promotion of the film “Cars”. “Cars” is a 2006 Disney channel film by Pixar. Prior to the release of the movie, many merchandise items were branded or had a theme of the film.
The film had more than seventy licenses from different companies promoting it. The cross-promotion has many promotional partners that include Hertz, Mack Trucks, Porsche, and Target among others. About seventy toy cars producers also came in to cross-promote the film. Others cross-promotion products include games like Sound Game and Cars UNO Game race among others. Many publishers also published books on the film.
For example, books like “Cars Paperback” and “Learn to Draw Disney Pixar’s Cars” among many other books were the products from different publishers that were cross-promoting the film. Other products cross-promoting the film include clothing lines branding their clothes with the film and all other home and office equipment manufacturers. The promotional partners alone spent many resources to promote the film. All the branding and themes on different products ensure that the world of the film will saturate markets. By promoting the products with the film’s brand or theme, the different organizations will be promoting the film itself. The result is that many people will know of the film and will purchase it.
The cross-promotion does not only benefit Disney World, but also the other companies too. The effect is that there are many touch points to people ensuring massive sales.
