She-Hulk’s marketing for season one has been brilliant. Viral marketing for movies and augmented reality are coming more into fashion and working better since Marvel’s famous tiny marketing campaign with the first Ant-Man movie. Now She-Hulk has proved itself not just by hitting its target audience but by extending that range and inspiring viral gags just from the content of its show.
She-Hulk also took a hint from the Ant-Man campaign and used its traditional marketing (billboards, posters) to bring that viral content out into the real world. She-Hulk is in a unique position in the MCU. The show’s new take on existing ideas about the MCU makes it a very hot topic of discussion.
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There have been critiques of She-Hulk’s marketing strategy since it began. Many have said it detracts from the story or that it is not what they want to see from the MCU show. While many of these naysayers are just internet trolls (whom She-Hulk made a gag of using Intelligencia), other critics are regular MCU fans with video blogs or some other way of being vocal. And those fans usually mark themselves by saying this isn’t something they expected from She-Hulk. The complaints about the marketing become complaints about the show, pointing out that not all MCU shows are for everyone anymore. Because the marketing has done what it’s supposed to do, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking about it.
She-Hulk’s Viral Marketing
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Viral marketing campaigns have been successful ever since Twitter did its first live update at SXSW. It’s been a fun and interactive part of being involved with some of our favorite products. And movies and TV have begun using marketing strategies to great effect. When Ant-Man first premiered, Marvel made a series of hidden sculptures, encouraging fans to find them. They took the form of tiny action figures having a superhero fight on a small scale all over the city. Marvel even had shrunken bus shelters with tiny Ant-Man movie posters in them. Fans found them and shared them on social media.
She-Hulk’s marketing campaign has been equally creative. Following the angle of the show’s subtitle, Attorney at Law, the ads looked a lot like ones you might see for small-time law firms. They appeared on the backs of park benches and billboards with a smiling She-Hulk face and phone number, much like how you see injury lawyers advertise. There was even a big, green, She-Hulk-sized bench with an attorney’s ad on the back of it. You had to jump to sit on it. Many of these were defaced when the show revealed that She-Hulk villain Titania would be starting a rivalry. Jameela Jamil was seen as Titania vandalizing She-Hulk ads and putting up her own posters over She-Hulk’s.
Reflecting on the more personal side of the show, Marvel also created a She-Hulk Tinder profile. It got a lot of attention for the show very quickly. It even went so far as to slide into a couple of people’s DMs. It previewed a side of the show that was about Jennifer Walters’ relationship with herself and with She-Hulk. We started to see in the later episodes that Jen actually made that Tinder profile as She-Hulk and how it was so much more popular compared to her own.
It was a thematic part of the show, bringing the rest of us in before we even knew it was part of the show. It’s always a creative and popular option to create an ad that allows fans to interact with something they have great anticipation before. And when you do that for a movie or TV show, you bring part of that fiction into reality.
She-Hulk’s Marketing Controversy
Marvel Studios
She-Hulk’s Tinder profile also sparked a remarkable amount of backlash from particular fans. Before the show premiered, many people said it was a cheap or inauthentic way to advertise for She-Hulk. But these ad strategies have been successful how much attention they’ve gained for the show. Not only that but the interactive take on the ad campaign is exactly the way The Batman advertised its movie only a few months earlier. The interactive mystery that fans had to solve as part of the trailers was hailed as an innovative way to promote a film.
Many fans said this wasn’t the kind of thing they expected from a Marvel show. And after the show came out, they were proven right. She-Hulk takes the traditional MCU program and moves it in a very different direction. Before Avengers: Endgame, the MCU followed an incredibly similar pattern of superhero movies that appealed to a very specific demographic. She-Hulk isn’t the kind of show that appeals to the same demographic. It still has a superhero narrative with superhero action, but it comes with an almost Sex In the City vibe at times. She-Hulk is a distinctly feminine show that has come under greater critical scrutiny simply because it works with the MCU concept differently. And it doesn’t deserve to be punished for that.
