Two areas I try to follow for marketing developments relevant to ProHipHop are film and gaming.  Though I’m trying not to post too often on non hip hop related endeavors, like everyone else interested in online marketing, the saga of Snakes on a Plane has caught my attention.

I’m mentioning it now primarily to refer to one of the more surprising development revealed in these excerpts from a press release:

Landmark Merchandise Licensing Agreement Between New Line Cinema and CafePress.com Allows Fans to Design and Sell Merchandise Inspired by the Much Anticipated Film Snakes on a Plane

FOSTER CITY, Calif., Aug. 14 /PRNewswire/ — CafePress.com and New Line Cinema announce the launch of a partnership allowing fans the opportunity to create merchandise inspired by the film Snakes on a Plane. Creating a unique program in the true ‘citizen’ spirit of Snakes on a Plane, New Line is partnering with fans to permit them to become official licensees of Snakes merchandise. An interactive promotion with CafePress.com will permit their network of over 2.9 million members to unleash their creativity to transform Snakes artwork and ideas into unique gifts and share in the revenue stream. This completely unique approach to fan licensing has never previously been embraced by any motion picture studio.

What particularly caught my attention was the concept of "partnering with fans to permit them to become official licensees of Snakes merchandise".  It’s a rather startling development in licensing and takes a variety of emergent threads and ties them together quite nicely.  From what I can tell, CafePress.com shopkeepers are still making their tiny cut while the promotion will benefit both CafePress.com and the makers of Snakes on a Plane.

One of the things that’s especially important is that this approach allows content owners to create a legal context for fan created content while monetizing that activity in a reasonably non-restrictive manner.

By utilizing CafePress.com, they can also extend the process to folks that would never get around to making a bootleg t-shirt but might consider buying one if the opportunity arose as well as letting affiliates like me run ads that link to Snakes on a Plane products.  It’s really one of the smarter moves I’ve seen of late.

However, checking the CafePress.com site, I was surprised to not initially find anything on the home page though a search for "snakes on a plane" took me to the "Portal" but with one of those long nutty database addresses that caused me to turn to Google for the Snakes on a Plane Portal url.  Rechecking the home page I finally saw the Portal ad in rotation with other ads so it was quite easy to miss.

Since there are already 1,320 designs in the Portal, I assume this has been set up long enough to include the domain in the press release, but apparently I’ve got a lot of funny ideas about such things since they simply included the CafePress.com homepage.  Let’s just say that sending journalists to a home page where they may not necessarily notice a rotating ad sounds like an odd lapse for a campaign that has worked the Internet to filth.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time for a roundup of all the folks writing about this campaign, but did find that the Wikipedia entry seems to reflect the involvement of Snakes on a Plane marketing entities.  Whatever the deal is there, the entry goes into quite a bit of detail about the marketing campaign.

Chris Thilk at Movie Marketing Madness also takes an extensive look at the campaign and remarks that among his "favorite decisions by New Line" was their decision to work with CafePress.com.

I’m really struck by the fact that the movie itself doesn’t sound nearly as interesting as the campaign and that the campaign itself suggests interesting artistic possibilities for marketing products that don’t yet exist.

By the way, saying the campaign may be more interesting than the movie is not an insult, by any means.  I mean, would you go to a movie called Snakes on a Plane starring Samuel L. Jackson if everybody kept telling you it was interesting?  I’d be looking for funny, creepy, scary, lightweight, entertaining, etc.