I love Star Wars (name any 30-something man who doesn’t), but even putting that love aside, I think what Sky Movies have done to publicise them showing all six Star Wars movies is pretty clever. They’ve commissioned a comedy version of all the movies - in just 20 minutes! Star Wars Shortened will be filmed in front of a live audience in London on Thursday, and then shown on Sky Movies from next week.

Ignore the fact Sky Movies has a big budget and friends in high places (George Lucas probably won’t take your calls). Here are the reasons this was a good publicity move:

1) It’s clever, original and interesting to the media – they know how popular Star Wars is, and this is a fresh angle on it. A nice story for silly season (there’s not so much news around when everyone’s on holiday).

2) It generates fantastic word-of-mouth… I found out about this when a friend called specifically to tell me about it!

3) They’ve got a competition online, which is great for driving more people to their website, and rewarding those browsers who are looking for more info about it

4) It beautifully ties into the thing they’re trying to promote.

So what are the lessons for you? Plan well ahead – I imagine Sky Movies got onto this as soon as they bought the films. And be creative… how many DVD stores will get all their staff to wear Darth Vader masks and carry lightsabres when the new 6 film DVD finally goes on sale? Not many. So those who do will really stand out.

Tags: Star Wars

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2006 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Publicity ideas, Publicity stunts, Word of mouth publicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.