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Holland presents this as a unique opportunity to celebrate the fandom, which is why (mainly) fan accounts from across the world have been chosen. They’re not dropping in any real order, nor do the influencers appear to be spacing them out, meaning the only way to be sure you’ve spotted the latest clip is to madly refresh. It’s certainly a unique idea… but it actually feels so very Marvel after one Avengers: Doomsday marketing trick last year.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is Borrowing a Trick From Avengers: Doomsday
The idea is pretty simple, really; turn a single announcement into a day-long event, maximizing engagement and brand awareness. Marvel used exactly the same approach with a live-stream announcing Doomsday‘s cast in March last year; that time round, it was an hours-long event in which the camera panned from one chair to another, revealing name after name of actors who’d be in the film. There were even some delightful surprises slipped in, such as chairs featuring character from the Fox X-Men films. Now, roughly one year later, Marvel and Sony are riffing on the idea.
To be fair, it’s a natural evolution, and there’s something quite pleasant about the idea of integrating fan influencers into the marketing (a mum influencer briefly raised eyebrows, but her post celebrating it was too cute to criticize). The problem, though, is that it’s not working quite so effectively; the chair reveal at least ran at clockwork, whereas there’s no currently no pattern to the Brand New Day clips that are releasing. Worse still, other social media accounts are ripping the clips without attributing them, which seems very disrespectful given the context… and also means newsfeeds are currently flooded with the same clips.
That last point does mean the strategy is working. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is trending, and will continue to trend for hours – spreading the impact of this trailer drop across literal days. But it’s also proving pretty annoying for the fans, not least because the first clips were atmospheric shots that didn’t really have any context. One was an admittedly stunning recreation of the cover of Amazing Fantasy #15, another showed Peter Parker collapsing for unknown reasons, a third was a traditional shot of Spider-Man leaping into action, and the fourth was just plain weird. Hopefully there will be some real surprises as the day continues.
Fans Aren’t Impressed By Marvel’s New Marketing Approach
Marvel’s new marketing approach is designed to maximize engagement. That said, it’s not leading to a particularly satisfying experience for viewers, because they’re not really getting an actual sense of the film itself. This is vibes-based marketing rather than anything real, and there’s a lot more to an actual trailer than just vibes. The best trailers give us a sense of a film’s themes and narrative flow; it’s not that they spoil too much, but rather that they leave viewers confident they have a sense of what they’re going to see. So far, all this has said is that Brand New Day is a Spider-Man movie.
Amusingly, the fans are at least excited about Peter Parker collapsing. A large part of the fandom has always taken a certain grim satisfaction in the “Parker luck,” the idea that Spider-Man is a hero whose life just doesn’t quite work out. Other than that, though, the weird approach to the trailer drop is the story in itself, rather than the film. It’s a gimmick, and the gimmick is distracting from the movie rather than selling it.
The best trailers do not require this kind of gimmick. They don’t trend because they’ve been drip-fed, but because they’re designed well enough to leave a fanbase delighted and excited. The irony is that Spider-Man: Brand New Day probably didn’t need anything like this, because the film is likely to be one of the best-performing in the year; the Spider-Man brand is strong, and any superhero fatigue is unlikely to affect it. Still, at least the event will only last so long, and then there will be an actual trailer to watch.
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