Dive Brief:

• Disney is promoting "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" with digital billboards in New York City's Times Square and Toronto's TEC Towers that display real-time Twitter reactions from fans, per Ad Age's Creativity.
• The out of home (OOH) campaign also includes rotating images from the cast of the film. The tweets are delivered by Dive, an OOH broadcast platform.
• On Dec. 14, a day before the film's nationwide release, there had already been 1.8 million tweets about "The Last Jedi" since the period starting Dec. 1, according to Twitter data cited by Creativity. That figure is likely surging now that the film is in theaters and generating a lot of post-viewing discussions.

Dive Insight:

Marketing around any addition to "Star Wars" is usually a behemoth event, but Disney, Twitter and Dive show one way to blend OOH elements with user-generated content to drum up real-time excitement both during and after a film's release. "The Last Jedi," directed by Rian Johnson, has proved surprisingly divisive among fans of the storied blockbuster franchise, but for those who enjoyed the eighth chapter in the long-running series, the campaign amplifies their voice and brings a certain level of personalization and relevance.

There are some risks associated with this approach — a negative or inappropriate tweet might be able to slip through the cracks — but for the most part, it's a novel way to bridge digital marketing with the real world. Other Hollywood studios have also taken to interactive OOH this year, including Sony Pictures, which used characters from "The Emoji Movie" to showcase weather and traffic on billboards over the summer.  

Promotions around "The Last Jedi" have also extended well beyond traditional static billboards and TV and in-theater ads. Disney has been leveraging augmented reality (AR) at several points, including through an AR treasure hunt with big-box retail partners over the summer and, more recently, exclusive virtual stickers for Google's Pixel 2 smartphone.