Disneyland Paris ties with MTV for new ride promotion

by Alice Burnfield, Brand Republic 18-Feb-08, 16:00

LONDON - Disneyland Resort Paris is launching a major cross-media campaign this month for its new ride, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, involving a competition to create an ad to air on MTV.

The multi-faceted campaign, aimed at families with older children and teenagers, encompasses TV and print advertising, a dedicated website and a nationwide promotion through the RSVP cross-media sales team of Viacom Brand Solutions, GCap Media and IPC Ignite!.

The promotion will run on VBS' MTV channel and GCap's One Network collection of radio stations from today, and will encourage members of the public to create their own ad for the new attraction.

Attempts can be uploaded to a website dedicated to the campaign and a public vote will narrow down the 10 best ads to a winner.

The overall winner will be taken to the resort where they will see their ad made by Disney and MTV, before it airs on the network in April.

Online activity has already started with a viral seeded onto sites such as Wildfire, Boreme and Kontraband. The 42-second black and white film features a dog emerging from the attraction, stretched and distorted -- a "victim" of the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror experience.

The viral links to the website, which also offers people the chance to upload their photos to be distorted as if they had also entered the Twilight Zone.

In a later stage of the campaign, timed to coincide with the opening of the attraction on April 5, Disney has booked a special installation at the Centrepoint billboard in London.

For four weeks from April 7, the billboard will be dressed to appear like the Hollywood Tower Hotel featured in the ride. An integral screen will show the distorted pictures of people previously generated by the website.

The billboard will be supported a nationwide campaign of six-sheet posters and interactive posters in ten key locations around London.

According to Federico Gonzalez, senior vice-president of marketing for Disneyland Resort Paris, the campaign is designed to appeal to 13- to 15-year-olds through media platforms they engage with.

Gonzalez said: "We are delighted to develop a marketing campaign to attract new, older children to Disneyland Resort Paris. Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is a white-knuckle ride and we wanted to create a fast-paced, fun marketing campaign to reflect this."