“You were made to be ruled.” Tom Hiddleston’s Loki spoke those words in the first trailer for The Avengers, the 2012 film that took Marvel Studios to new heights and brought Hiddleston’s God of Mischief to new levels of popularity.
Nearly a decade later, Ayaz is still living in Loki’s world, with the exec’s team dreaming up mischievous ways to engage fans over the six-week run of Loki, the latest Disney+ series set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“We try not to do everything in character because that’s a lot to ask an actor to dress up as Loki every single time,” says Ayaz of teaming with Hiddleston on Loki.
The marketing work begins all the way back at the time a series is greenlit, with Ayaz and a few team members getting access to scripts and footage as it comes in.
We try not to do everything in character, because that’s a lot to ask an actor to dress up as Loki every single time.
Then we have access to different footage, what they’ve shot so far, and we start developing a timeline of how we want this campaign to look, based on the release date, when we want to announce it, when we want to give a first-look at footage from the series.
You have a marketing campaign that goes on for weeks across the season and all the way through the finale when you want people to binge and catch up and tune in for the final episode.
Because so much time had gone by since the date was pushed, we didn’t want to look like we were going back to the exact same campaign.
It was a little bit scaled back due to safety protocols and all of that, but we have had one.
We put a lot of thought and a lot of creativity into what we want the fans to experience, what we want to fans to own when they see the film and not necessarily spoil it pre-release.
They are handling it but there is a level of coordination to make sure that it’s a win-win for everybody.
I had a conversation with him and the team about it, and we moved really quickly and gave the fans the footage they were looking for, which is not traditional marketing and advertising, but it was a sensation.
The song was on iTunes, it was climbing the charts, the clip went viral so we quickly cut that.
I wouldn’t say there is a whiteboard, but we do put our ideas on paper and we do put them on whiteboards but we don’t leave them up.