What Angelina Jolie’s Leg Can Teach us About Marketing

Just the title of this piece would have been unthinkable in the pre-social media age which perfectly illustrates the power of social media to disrupt and create both noise and signal out of seemingly innocuous events.

The Oscars night is obviously a big thing for the film industry but no one would ever expect to use it to take social media marketing lessons from an actress no matter how talented she may be in her field. Yet, as I am writing this, the word ‘Legbombing’ brings up over a quarter of a million pages on Google, it made the Oscars night suddenly hip, it equated Angelina Jolie’s brand with cool, it became a trending topic on Twitter for five days running, and it has generated publicity worth an incalculable amount of money.

And how was it done? The innocent amongst us will think it has to do with Angelina Jolie’s looks and luck and that slit evening gown and they will be only partially right. Yes, all that played a part but the red carpet was awash with beauties in revealing gowns. This is, after all, Hollywood and beauty, talent and a practised ability to catch the camera’s eye and stand out from the crowd go with the territory.

For Angelina Jolie to achieve this so seemingly effortlessly it took a tiny bit of luck and the kind of savvy about how publicity works which should make social media marketers sit up and take notes.

Employing the exact same formula detailed in my Social Media Marketing Formula recipe Angelina’s success is directly attributable to the seven steps mentioned there. To get to that point however she had to make some critical decision so here’s how she did it in three easy steps:  

Step 1. Create a focal point. On the red carpet, outside the Oscars, Angelina struck an admittedly overdone, but absolutely eye-catching and studied pose with her right leg sticking out of a plain black, off-the-shoulders Atelier Versace gown. With photographers and fans there Angelina lost no opportunity to show off her right leg. Trite, right? Maybe, if it had been left at that. But the gamble paid off. In the social media age Twitter suddenly lit up with comments about Angelina Jolie’s leg. Good or bad, at that stage it was irrelevant. There was noise. Now all that was needed was a nudge or two, for Angelina to turn that noise into a signal.

Step 2. Reinforce it. Having heard from her own media people that Twitter was beginning to stir with comments about her pose Angelina, next walking onstage to present the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, stopped at the microphone for several seconds with her hand on her hip and that leg on full display again. The audience, already aware of the rising Twitter storm exploded in wolf whistles and cheering, thus making Angelina’s leg now impossible to ignore and setting the stage for the next required ingredient.

Step 3. Make it fun. Screenwriter Jim Rush, annoyed with the attention Angelina Jolie was receiving, moments after being presented by her with the Oscar, struck the same ridiculous, overdone pose himself. Angelina laughed, the audience hooted and an internet meme was instantly born.

Angelina’s right leg has appeared on millions of photoshopped historical monuments and moments of political importance, it has appeared, cleverly superimposed on actors, actresses and political figures including the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and Queen Elizabeth.

Jolie’s father was called in to take part on TV Talkshow, Daybreak in the UK, to talk about it. The Press headlines, a day after the Oscars, were dominated by it rather than the Oscar awards and even now, social networks seem to be overflowing with Jolie’s right leg legbombing practically everything from the Statue of Liberty to Michel Angelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Jolie has a film coming out soon. In Hollywood, like in any competitive business arena, brand power translates into cold hard cash with better deals, more lucrative contracts and, of course, a huge attraction for fans. My guess is that legbombing is not going to hurt her prospects.