By Carl DiOrio
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Steven Spielberg loves
billboards. That's the simple explanation for those giant
double-billboard promos for "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull" throughout Los Angeles, as well as the huge
Indy messages plastered around all four sides of Madison Square
Garden in New York.
Paramount mounted a big outdoor-advertising campaign in
2007 for the Spielberg-produced "Transformers," and when the
studio was strategizing how to scream "event pic!" in marketing
the Spielberg-directed Indy sequel, the creative hyphenate had
just one suggestion: more.
"Steven said, 'I know they always do big billboards in
L.A., but let's do them all over,"' said Steve Siskind,
executive vice president advertising and marketing at
Paramount.
That enthusiasm led to the MSG placements adjacent to
commuter-nexus Penn Station as well as major billboard
"dominations" -- that's what the industry calls it when you
really "own" a site, Siskind noted -- in Chicago, San
Francisco, Houston, Dallas and elsewhere. Airports were
targeted in several hub markets.
Several Los Angeles sites were selected for their proximity
to freeways.
"I guess it's kind of a trains, planes and automobiles
strategy," Siskind chuckled.
To make the Los Angeles locations stand out, Paramount went
to CBS Outdoor and other vendors of billboard sites it uses
throughout the year and asked whether there was a chance of
adding adjacent sites to allow one message to run across two
billboards.
Paramount execs said they believed it was the first time
anyone has employed multiple billboards for a single movie
message.
