Client: A24 Films
When Swiss Army Man premiered at Sundance, audience reactions were split. A number of viewers just couldn’t wrap their heads around the merits of a farting, irreverent corpse and decided to walk out.
Those who did stay however, came to understand that the film was much more than fart jokes and boners. It’s a heartfelt, profound look at the power of friendship and reveals how help can come from the most unexpected places when life is at its lowest.
When A24 approached us to work on this campaign, we knew we had to communicate this sentiment with a big picture strategy that encompassed both physical and digital spaces.
Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) is the film’s protagonist and a literal Swiss Army Man. When he washes up on a deserted beach next to a suicidal Hank (Paul Dano), he becomes a life saving utility tool, providing Hank with water, fire, weaponry and most importantly - companionship.
After discussing the film with A24, we collectively determined that everyone should have a Manny in their lives and that our campaign should afford fans the opportunity to do just that - meet their best friend Manny. Specifically, by carrying on a text message dialogue with him that would reveal his various useful qualities as your relationship with him progressed.
What transpired was a month-long integrated campaign comprised of an influencer mailer, an interactive digital experience, a robust SMS campaign, real world activations and supporting social media content. I was responsible for producing all of the above and working with the creative leads on my team to execute across all platforms.
So how could we get people to text Manny or better yet, why would they even want to? We knew that we had to start the conversation somehow and figured that it was up to us to make the first move.
Working with an SMS partner, we developed an automated dialogue that could be used once users texted a code to opt-in to the experience. Keeping with the deserted island theme, we put together “Manny In A Bottle” press mailers - glass bottles with rolled up cut-outs of Manny that instructed users to text “SOS” for further information.
Once users opted into the SMS experience, the were immediately greeted with dialogue from Manny driving them to swissarmyman.com
Upon arrival, users were greeted by an interactive, 3D Manny corpse with rag-doll capabilities. On both desktop and mobile, users could drag Manny around, throw him, poke him (he farted tweets), make him dance....the possibilities were endless. Most importantly though, users could continue to text with Manny, who’d respond with different keywords to type into the site. Doing so would showcase his full utility capabilities and reveal select clips and footage from the film.
In addition to hours of entertainment, the real value of the site was to seamlessly integrate people into the SMS experience. After interacting with Manny to discover his quirks and capabilities, most users remained opted-in and were available to continue participating during later stages of the campaign.
As the weeks progressed, users continued to receiving texts from Manny. Conversations covered a variety of topics and allowed Manny to gain an understanding of basic human staples like sex, Netflix, love and sadness. This required us to deep dive into our text messaging API and custom script dialogue that could cater to all of our active users simultaneously. We built a back-end dashboard that allowed for manual conversations between the filmmakers and users as well.
The more people texted with Manny, the more he felt the love and the more compelled he was to provide help to his new friends. In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, fans received multiple offerings from Manny including encouraging phone calls, free pizza, and other Swiss Army Man swag. A24 even took Manny on a cross-country tour to hang out with fans in person.
Manny truly became everyone’s best friend and the people were stoked!
Throughout the SMS campaign, custom content was generated to support weekly initiatives. Select keywords were featured on social videos that prompted users to text Manny for new surprises.
Users who texted the keyword FEELINGS received a text from Manny asking “What is sex like?” The responses were so good, we featured them (anonymously of course) on a dedicated microsite.
Users who texted the keyword RAPTOR received a special voicemail featuring Manny and Hank singing them the theme song to Jurassic Park.
Shareable GIFs, Bitmojis and other pieces of video content were also seeded out to further support the campaign.
Automated SMS
Most SMS carries aren’t setup to handle a high volume of multi-message conversations simultaneously. We had to make sure that our scripts were not only being delivered, but also being carried out to completion.
Making Manny
Created a quality 3D likeness for Manny required a lot of effort, especially rigging him to work in Web-GL with ragdoll physics. Certainly do-able, just a lot of effort by some incredibly talented people.
The campaign received a tremendous amount of press pick up, specifically around the launch of the site. The highlight was a very prominent plug (skip to 3:23) by Daniel Radcliffe himself while being interviewed on Stephen Colbert’s late night show. We were fortunate enough to receive several industry awards as well including a Gold Clio Entertainment Award, FWA Site of the Month and Awwwards Site of the Day.
Any project where you get to invest your time and effort into making an interactive farting corpse rag doll and get paid for it is pretty cool. Definitely one of my most memorable.
Credits
Agency: Watson DG
Executive Creative Director: Fernando Ramirez
Creative Director: Hleb Marholin
Strategist/Copywriter: Arin Delaney
Developers: William Chen, Florian Morel, John Iacoviello
Art Directors: Brandon Moats, Louis Ansa
Designer: Browny Maloney
3D Artist: Alex Hsu
Editors: Ryan Shelton, Cameron Brown
Producer: Greg Meltzer