OPINION - Welcome to the advertising era of... Ryan Reynolds?

Advertising theorists must be shitting themselves as Ryan Reynolds (yes, that one) is ripping up the rule book.

If you’ve been connected to the internet in the last couple of months, you’d have surely been exposed to at least one of the many advertising campaigns he has run for the myriad of his ventures. Examples include;

Deadpool (a promo with Hugh Jackman)

• 7,300,000 views on YouTube in 1 day

• 3,500,000 likes on Instagram in 1 day

• 13.8m views, 650,000 likes & 136k retweets in 1 day on Twitter

• 38,000 likes in 1 day on LinkedIn

Mint mobile  (a promo with Don Vultaggio)

• 350k views in 8hrs on YouTube

• 395k likes in 8hrs on Instagram

• 228k, 7,750 likes and 543 retweets in 8hrs on Twitter

• 7,500 likes in 8hrs on Linkedin

Welcome to Wrexham (a promo with Rob McElhenney)

MNTN (a promo with Steve-O)

Aviation Gin

(And in what is now weekly updates - another video for Aviation Gin released on the 2nd of October)

Every product RR (I’m going to call him that) is involved in is ‘disruptive’, from buying a lower league football club through to keeping the same prices for his mobile companies tariffs through a global inflation crisis. The traction his products are getting is something which many marketing managers around the world will be envious of.

RR has millions of followers on every social media platform but leveraging that following for his own value is another story. He setup a production agency called Maximum Effort which merged with a CTV tech company called MNTN (a tool for planning and buying CTV effortlessly) – he attributes a lot of his success to the combination of these two, as well as truly believing they can out-market the competition.

The formula seems to be; humorous digital video involving him and someone else + social media share + extended reach through (some light) paid CTV advertising. The campaigns appear to be a ‘one and done’ for mass reach and awareness.

The rub to these efforts is wondering if they will work long-term. He’s not the first to run ads which are humorous, or even the first to leverage the scale of his following. But we ad industry professionals, know good advertising isn’t only about awareness and views, it’s about conversion and sales. That requires inter-connected campaigns (and often these utilise heavy paid advertising budgets). Maybe RR doesn’t care. Maybe given his platform he doesn’t need much paid advertising. Maybe measurement is for suckers. Maybe everyone is wrong. But I’m incredibly interested to see how his approach plays out in the coming months.

One thing is for sure though, I will continue to laugh at the video’s he’s involved with, as he tries to disrupt the industry I’m involved in - the advertising one.