7-Eleven Hosts Fantastic 4 Screenings and Game
7-Eleven is suiting up for a month-long promotions blitz tied to “Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer,” starting with advanced screenings this week.
The campaign showcases 7-Eleven’s Slurpee brand, which gets a cameo in the movie, to promote a new Slurpee energy drink flavor.
The c-store chain will host exclusive screenings in 20 cities to pump up audiences for the June 15 premiere of the film. A Fantastic 4 instant-win game will award 444 prizes, including four grand-prize trips.
Grand-prize winners get a trip to a 20th Century Fox movie premiere; a walk-on role in a Fox feature film; a visit to a 20th-Century Fox movie set; or to play videogames with the creator of the new Fantastic 4 game from Take-Two Interactive.
Another 440 smaller prizes include the videogame, life-size sculptures of the Silver Surfer, DVDs of the first Fantastic 4 movie and movie posters. Fans visit Slurpee.com or 7-Eleven.com to play the game, which runs through June 30.
Slurpee also gets a Fantastic 4 limited-edition collectible cup, a 44-oz. Super Big Gulp cup with the film’s four superheroes—Mr. Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing—and the film’s villain, the Silver Surfer.
Slurpee’s energy drink, the featured flavor for June, has caffeine, ginseng, taurine and guarana.
This is the second summer that 7-Eleven is using movie tie-ins as a wide promotional platform. The strategy began last year with another 20th Century Fox movie, “X-Men: The Last Stand” (May 2006 PROMO).
This spring, 7-Eleven tied in with “Spider-Man 3” with an online game, Spin the Web, that brought three winners to New York for a pre-screening of the film before its May 4 premiere (May 2007 PROMO).
“Superheroes have been around 7-Eleven for 30-plus years, but for most of that time, they appeared on our drink cups,” said Jay Wilkins, category manager for Big Gulp and Slurpee beverages, in a statement. “We still have very cool cups, but today’s movies are much bigger events, and the promotions have to be as well. Movie screenings, trips, product placement in movies, online games, special Slurpee colors and concoctions help 7-Eleven stay relevant in the minds of movie fans and consumers.”
Omnicom Group’s Freshworks handles 7-Eleven promotions. The division was formed specifically to serve 7-Eleven through a collaboration of four Omnicom agencies: Tracy Locke, TPN, Dieste Harmel & Partners and The Integer Group.
