Mohanlal and Jeethu Joseph’s locked room thriller, 12th Man, is getting ready to start streaming on Disney plus Hotstar on May 20. With only a few days until the release, the killer promotion campaigns have been causing quite a stir for the past few weeks. The creative team behind this thrilling movie promotion is Maitri Advertising Works. This is not the first time Maitri has created magic for Disney + Hotstar. The fun and engaging campaigns done for the movie Bro Daddy were indeed blockbusters in advertising.
Understanding the genre of the movie, the campaign was named “Killing Soon”. The poster series was conceptualised to look like mugshots where everyone would be a suspect with a suspect board in their hands to create curiosity. The campaign for 12th Man took off with Mohanlal changing his profile picture on Facebook with the 12th Man’s character poster. This was followed by the other cast of the film releasing their posters as suspects on their social media handles. The posts were soon flooded with comments from both fans and celebrities.
To boost the hype of the campaign, three promo films were made with actors Shivada, Unni Mukundan, and Anusree. The movies set in a mystery mode were thrilling and intriguing. By the looks of how the campaigns of the movie were received by the audience, the film is also expected to have a killer opening.
Speaking about the campaign, Ajay Sathyan, Head – Digital & Creatives, Maitri Advertising Works, says, “‘The brief was pretty clear from the client. We had to come up with intense and thrilling pieces on digital without giving away the film’s context. That’s how we arrived at ‘Killing Soon’ as an umbrella campaign, and John Zachariah wrote some crisp and tight films with 3 actors who were available to shoot, which were highly appreciated by the director, Jeethu Joseph, himself. We also had this idea of having celebrities hold boards with each of them being labelled as suspects and numbering them so that the audience would get really confused and actually watch the movie to find out who the real killer is . The interactions were very high as expected all over social media and the hype was created for the most awaited release of this killer combo-Jeethu & Mohanlal’. “