MUMBAI: A few days ago at the DoubleClick Insight Awards in the US, entertainment marketing and promotions firm Deep Focus took home a first-place award in the Best Rich Media Campaign. Its campaign for Miramax's film Kill Bill Volume 1 was cited for the honours.
 

 
Open to all agencies, direct marketers, and publishers in the US, this year's edition of the Insight Awards received over 100 campaign entries. The Deep Focus campaign was designed to build anticipation and awareness for Quentin Tarantino's kung fu film. This was done before the television advertising. The goal was to introduce the film's potential audience to its marketing assets -- trailers and TV commercials. As a direct result, there were more than three million unique audience interactions with the film's content and five per cent of all opening-week impressions resulted in local show-time lookups. This helped put people in seats.

Deep Focus' creative director Robert Knuell was quoted in an official release saying, "When we develop an online campaign, we implement unique and original creative executions which make the content entertaining and fresh." Deep Focus' president Ian Schafer added, "The campaign fortified the effects of massive amounts of television advertising by using high-impact online creative. The aim was not only to prepare audiences for the enormous shock they were about to get in theaters, but to also compel them to show up there and experience it in the key first weekend of release."

"Kill Bill was a groundbreaking creative opportunity for Deep Focus immersing us in the surreal universe that Quentin had created for the film. The iconic imagery, the unforgettable characters, and the addictive soundtrack inspired our collective imagination, while removing all traditional advertising boundaries. This unique film deserved a unique advertising campaign, and we wanted to be the ones to deliver it."

The Brooklyn-based firm has been creating original online advertising and media campaigns since their inception in 2002. In addition to Kill Bill Deep Focus has created creative and media campaigns for films such as the Oscar nominated documentary Spellbound, Old School (DreamWorks), Barbershop 2 (MGM), and Scary Movie 3 (Dimension).

Deep Focus was founded on the understanding of how fusing interactive and traditional marketing tactics can be leveraged to exponentially increase entertainment brand exposure. Doubleclick provides tools for advertisers, direct marketers and web publishers to plan, execute and analyse their marketing programmes.