Inside the ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’ marketing bonanza

Deadpool & Wolverine has done a lot of advertising.

A whole lot.

The film has partnered with brands including Aviation American Gin, Dave & Buster’s, DiGiorno, Heinz, Jack in the Box, Heineken, Homage, Spotify, The Bachelorette, The Real Housewives of Orange County, Old Spice, Tim Hortons and Xbox ahead of its release on July 26.

Behind many of those ads is Ryan Reynolds-cofounded production company and marketing agency Maximum Effort—named after a catchphrase from the Merc with a Mouth—which allowed Reynolds to occasionally triple dip using his own agency to advertise his own movie using his own brands.

Campaign US spoke with George Dewey, cofounder of Maximum Effort, about making a film marketing campaign so robust it’s reminiscent of Barbie.

The following conversation was edited for clarity.

Campaign US: Why did you pursue so many brand partnerships for the marketing leading up to the movie’s release?

George Dewey: We weren’t looking for a particular number or volume of partnership. We were looking for cultural breakthrough.

It’s getting harder and harder to reach the velocity of cultural breakthrough. And so, while we wanted partners, we tried to be careful to choose partners that we thought could help us break through, not just with media, but with how they approached the partnership, like Xbox. 

Dewey stated that the production behind its ads varied between six to seven figures.

Can you break down how you picked what brands to work with? Were you generally being approached, or were you approaching them yourselves?

All of the above. Heineken approached us. We hadn’t worked with them before, but they had worked on some great campaigns so after a conversation we had a pretty high degree of confidence they’d do the level of work we want. It was the same with DiGiorno.

We had relationships with Aviation Gin, Jack in the Box and the Xbox team we knew through Disney.

The most important thing was figuring out if these people were game. It’s rare enough to get brands that want to partner on R-rated films, and then we needed brands that were willing to go there with the character’s tone.

Was there anything challenging about inserting the tone of the movie into so many different categories of brands?

The challenge with Deadpool tends to be—and this is why we did a lot of the work ourselves—is people default to fourth-wall breaking and d*** jokes. That’s part of the character, but it’s not what he’s really about. He’s about being morally flexible and wanting something you can’t have a lot of the time.

So the hardest part was you put all of these brands together and you have to find ways not to make the work feel repetitive.

In addition to me and Ryan, some of my first hires at Maximum Effort are five people who have worked on every single thing Deadpool has ever done on the marketing side. I brought together that team to serve as an encyclopedia of what Deadpool has done for the bulk of 10 years.

It was pretty rudimentary. We just figured out if we had ever done anything like these ads before.

Walk me through the process of creating ads with different agencies for the same product. How did you get them all familiar with the tone you’re trying to convey?

Any time you’re dealing with someone who’s done movie partnership work, they have to have collaborative, thick skin because there are so many parties involved.

Whether it was on the brand side, agency side or Disney/Marvel side, people were collaborative and open to feedback. 

A few of the brands you worked with are Reynolds’. What did he bring to the vision, strategy and execution of these ads?

He reviews every script and concept before we proceed. He was too busy trying to finish the film to do initial writing, but anything he was personally involved in, like Heineken and Heinz, he wanted to take a pass at the script.

You got a Taylor Swift shoutout on Instagram on Thursday. Did you have any part in getting that?

She reached out to Ryan and said she’d love to post about it. When she does that, you say yes.