A possibly accidental, probably intentional arrangement of paste-up movie ads really brought my attention to a marketing trend that is probably not new, but is definitely having a moment.
As you can likely guess from this picture, it's the use of character heads from the movie -- one per poster -- to sell the movie in and of themselves.
Usually it's characters you're familiar with from at least one other movie, as in one of these examples, but sometimes, the strength of the brand is enough. Or I guess, Rogue One was enough of a hit that the heads of brand new characters can now sell it -- though maybe that would have only worked for a BluRay release, not the original theatrical.
As both Star Wars and Marvel are owned by Disney, these posters are likely in cahoots with each other, but I like to think of their placement as random, as it would do more for my thesis that this advertising strategy is gaining in popularity. (There are also four Rogue One posters, but I had to cut off Felicity Jones as Jyn Erso for framing reasons. I was stopped at a red light so I'm kind of lucky I was able to snap this shot at all.)
And there's no doubt there's something really captivating about it. The Guardians posters benefit from their color scheme, to be sure, as the array of pastels is really pleasing. The Rogue One posters stand in contrast to that, though, their uniform blue and black color scheme probably subliminally functioning as a way to make you think of the packaging of a BluRay itself. (Or not so subliminally, as an actual Rogue One BluRay figures into each poster.)
I suppose I don't have a lot more to say about this -- it doesn't really strike me as indicative of some greater trend in the advertisement of movies, or some underlying psychology about the modern-day viewer. It's just smart design.
And thanks in part to the proximity of two ad campaigns with similar concepts, I'll now surely be on the lookout for it elsewhere.
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