Grinning ear to ear: Why the guerilla marketing for ‘Smile 2’ works so well

Smile! You’re on camera! This marketing campaign recently took a more innovative – not to mention, creepy – approach to promoting the new thriller film. Hiding among crowds, staring out building windows and driving in cars on the freeway, unsettling planted actors have generated viral buzz for the October 18 release of “Smile 2.”

Parker Finn’s “Smile” was released in 2022 and stars Sosie Bacon. The supernatural, psychological thriller was budgeted at $17 million and grossed over $217 million worldwide. The movie chilled audiences with the characters’ eerie disfigured smiles, an image that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.

In a recent interview, Finn told The Hollywood Reporter that things got serious about a sequel immediately after the film’s opening weekend. “But in approaching a sequel, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to do anything that just felt like a traditional continuation […] I really wanted to challenge myself to do something unexpected and quite strange for a sequel to ‘Smile.’”

“Smile 2″ stars Naomi Scott and still centers around the horrifying tale of a smiling demon that is passed from victim to victim like a disease. To go beyond cast interviews and an elevated poster design, the sequel’s marketing campaign decided to take the common phrase “put on a happy face” quite literally. Since early October, guerilla marketing techniques have both unnerved and excited audiences to buy movie tickets for the upcoming sequel.

On October 12, ominous grinning actors stared at people through windows above the busy streets of Times Square. Viral videos and pictures of the statue-esque actors in neon SMILE shirts spread across social media, and many marketing companies immediately praised the genius campaign. Marketing Journo shared a short video of the actors and wrote “To promote ‘Smile 2′, actors with creepy smiles have been spotted in New York!”

Two days later, at both the Yankees and Mets baseball games, more smiling actors stood out from the crowds on the jumbotron. FOX Sports: MLB shared a video of two people grinning behind the unaware players with the caption “That’s fine, I wasn’t planning to sleep tonight anyway.”

According to Daniel Chavkin for Sports Illustrated, “It was certainly impressive that these actors were able to hold their smiles for the entire game, and the marketing definitely worked as it got people talking about these weird fans at the games,” Chavkin said. “People may have had nightmares last night that they weren’t expecting.”

Stickers of smiling actors have also been placed strategically on car and bus windows to create an illusion of them riding in the backseat. These terrifying smiles have been spotted driving around Los Angeles and New York. Talk about “driving friendly.”

“Smile 2″ came out this past Friday and peaked at a respectable $23 million opening weekend box office debut, surpassing the original film’s $22.6 million. Variety predicts this “sleeper hit” will continue to succeed worldwide. In this case, public guerilla marketing contributed to reaching (and surpassing) the thriller’s 2022 box office precedent.

Recently, more and more films have adopted this type of approach to marketing. “It” had red balloons tied to storm drain grills around the nation, “Ant-Man” had tiny movie billboards stationed at bus stops and “Alien: Romulus” staged a recent alien attack in New York.

In the age of constant digital advertising, strategists have to come up with outside-of-the-box and innovative campaigns to attract the attention of audiences.

These marketing ideas need to be infectious enough to spread via news, social media, and word-of-mouth…and what’s more contagious than a smile?