What Can We Learn from Ron Burgundy?

“Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues” is releasing in just a few days on December 18th, 2013. It’s the follow up film to box office hit “Anchorman” starring Will Ferrell that released in 2004. In the last nine years, so much has happened. In 2004, MySpace was at large and now we’re busy on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and content marketing is growing daily. Also, the iPhone transformed the way we communicate and share our lives.

With this all in mind, it shouldn’t surprise us that the marketing team behind the film has taken advantage of a box of new tools to expand it’s efforts to get everyone to see the new film that weren’t around in 2004. Think about it, since then, the fan base for this film have grown up and began sharing their lives online.

This is not what I’m here to share with you today. What has excited me most about “Anchorman” is how the team behind this film has chosen to mix social media & actual media! Through this process, they’ve been reinventing guerrilla marketing. Typically, guerrilla marketing is low-cost and unconventional outreach to get a product sold. In this case, guerrilla marketing is unique as it’s backed by a billion dollar film studio.

In recent weeks, you may have seen Ron Burgundy blending into our society as a regular occurrence in our lives such as, walking among our streets with a box of donuts and 40 oz bottle, starring in his own car commercials, taking over ESPN and filling in on news programs. Don’t forget about his own ice cream and the fake autobiography in the New Yorker.

Photo credit: Rolling Stone

You feel like a winner when your content gets reactions. The films marketing team began the conversation and social media has taken from there. We’ve laughed about Ron Burgundy, we’ve tweeted about him, instagramed him and gone into work the next day asking your co-workers if they saw that hilarious ESPN interview. If the movie company were to instead, been posting the trailer and images of the film into our social networks, would they have gotten a reaction? (Not a better choice than what they’ve done) Absolutely, and they would have because Anchorman has a cult following (Most films gte attention already online). Instead, the team behind this decision made a brilliant move to tie together actual media we’ve known for years and the fastly growing social media and blend the two to crawl among our news feeds and seem realistic. What do I think of this? Absolutely brilliant.

Photo credit: Oreo

This all reminds me of when I was on Twitter during the 2013 Super Bowl. The power outage happened. Oreo took a product we buy at stores and combined comedy, product and relevance all into one and we responded. Oreo was a trending topic. How did they make this happen? They have a very talented marketing team who was waiting for a moment to strike.

Paramount played around with us little by little. We took it viral and they responded, with more Ron Burgundy. What I will say about this is, welcome to the new standard for entertainment marketing. We’ll all remember how good the marketing for Anchorman 2 was in 2013. We will notice when marketing isn’t “as good” for other upcoming films. Other film studios, other companies, even small content creators must take notice.

What can we learn from Ron Burgundy? Be original, funny, follow current events, be engaging and drink more scotty scotch scotch (okay maybe not that one).

I’d love to hear what you think of all this buzz for Anchorman 2. How do you think this will impact the future of marketing?