This morning, an ad banner on my My Yahoo! RSS feed reader caught my eye. As I am a fan of Will Ferrell, his upcoming NASCAR-themed film intrigues me. NASCAR is already a heavily branded/co-branded sport, and I'd previously noticed that Ferrell's "Ricky Bobby" character races for Wonder® Bread. Now it appears Ricky Bobby "himself" will be appearing in new ads for "exclusive" movie content available from Sprint.

The integration of movie characters into co-branded advertising is the focus of my research. Typically it is animated characters for children's films who have appeared in co-branded content. Spots for Chicken Little and The Incredibles feature the characters going to McDonald's. In 1997 2005, Burger King co-branded the Star Wars Trilogy's theatrical re-release Episode III release, and ran spots featuring a Storm Trooper and Darth Vader working at Burger King, with the tagline, "Star Wars is at Burger King." Most of the time, deeply co-branded content such as this does not feature "real" actors, but characters, animated or otherwise. Previously, "real" characters have been integrated through editing montage, which places clips from the movie in relation to ad content to create the illusion that characters are "interacting" with the ad. You see this type of advertising often when, say, VISA has a National Treasure sweepstakes. In these spots, Nicholas Cage is shown inspecting a dollar, accompanied by voice-over encouraging him to search for clues, find the treasure, etc. In the montage of the ad, this clip is decontextualized, and comes to reference the VISA sweepstakes.

Which is what makes the new spots featuring Ricky Bobby so interesting. In the words of Mike Goff, vice president of national advertising at Sprint, "Will Ferrell isn't promoting the exclusive movie content available on Sprint phones...Ricky Bobby is." Where does Will Ferrell end and Ricky Bobby begin? Ricky Bobby is not an animated character, or a Storm Trooper.

It was my understanding that Nextel officially sponsored NASCAR, but now Sprint and Nextel have merged, and this coupled with the fact that NASCAR has hired branded entertainment firm Madison Road to integrate the "brand" into entertainment commodities in television and film makes for an inordinately co-branded moment.

One possible question to ask of all this: If way back in the summer of 2005 Madison Road made a deal with NASCAR to create branded content, is it possible that Talladega Nights is one of their projects? So far I can't find anything backing up this claim. I'm sure the film is funny regardless.

For those of you less interested in my many links and wanting to just see the spots, here are some: