For his round, fiftieth birthday, the indestructible British secret agent James Bond received the best gifts he could imagine. In addition to the fact that the latest, 23rd installment of the series is being praised by film critics as the best yet, the weekend showed that it deserves superlatives when it comes to earnings as well.
As the website deadline.com reported this weekend, ‘Skyfall’ will very likely break box office records and bring hundreds of millions of fresh dollars to Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Just in the United Kingdom, an incredible £20.1 million was ‘turned over’ in the first weekend, which is the largest opening in the history of box office distribution in the Isles. The launch of ‘Skyfall’ was 76 percent more successful than ‘Casino Royale’, the installment in which Daniel Craig first appeared as Bond, and 30 percent better than ‘Quantum Of Solace’. If the initial numbers and the fact that it is currently the number one box office title in all markets are anything to go by, ‘Skyfall’ is estimated to earn around $700 million, thus breaking the record set by ‘Casino Royale’ at $427 million. To these beautiful numbers, it should be added that the theme song performed by the soulful Adele reached number one on iTunes just ten hours after its release, and that this installment is also a record holder in terms of money earned from advertisements and product placements.
Bond Celebrates His Birthday Just this last point, ahead of the film’s premiere, stirred up some spirits, as not only does Bond advertise a serious number of brands, but one sponsorship deal was the reason for an intervention in the agent’s ‘lifestyle’. More precisely, the phrase ‘shaken, not stirred’ has gone into history, and instead of Martini, Craig refreshes himself with Heineken. As reported by the British Guardian, this Dutch brand shelled out £28 million for its appearance in Skyfall, which is estimated to be almost a third of the total production costs. The uproar raised by fans over this was attempted to be quelled by Daniel Craig, who stated in a media address that the film costs almost as much as it needs to be promoted, so it is worth taking every sponsorship pound. Based on that statement, Guardian journalists concluded that promotional costs have risen to £90 million, although it is actually difficult to assess where the campaign for the film’s promotion begins and where it ends. In doing so, they primarily think of the fact that the year of ‘Skyfall’s’ distribution coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Fleming’s series, which was accompanied by numerous marketing activities during which Bond was promoted as a full-blooded British brand, part of the island’s cultural heritage. One such activity was the ‘stunt’ performed at the opening of the London Olympics when James Bond, in the flesh, accompanied the British queen to the ‘event’.
British Cultural Heritage As reported by brandchannel.com, it is likely that this action, which was followed by around 900 million souls, served as an impetus for the British tourist board VisitBritain to launch a global marketing campaign for the first time in history. The key idea of the television spot is to encourage viewers around the world to ‘live like Bond’ and finally visit Great Britain. VisitBritain has, on this occasion, formed partnerships with British Airways, the Radisson Blu hotel chain, Aston Martin, and Twentieth Century Fox, who thus got the opportunity to leverage the ‘hype’ around Bond to increase their own revenues. In addition to the television spot, the campaign includes print, outdoor, and, of course, digital campaigns as part of the themed site Agent UK, which ‘encourages users to solve missions across the United Kingdom’. Besides Great Britain, particularly London, which is most skillfully integrated into the film’s plot, it features Coke Zero, Caterpillar, Sony, Walther, BMW, and the aforementioned Heineken. Most of them did not stop at ‘product placement’, but connected their ‘terrestrial’ campaigns with ‘Skyfall’. Coca-Cola launched themed spots in which a young man saves a girl in a series of action scenes set to Bond’s musical backdrop and the slogan ‘Unlock the 007 in you’. As foreign media report, the idea was to connect the ‘dynamic and trendy’ brand Coca-Cola with the agent characterized by such epithets.
