In the UK and the Republic of Ireland, thousands of people will remember August 2025 as the month they saw Oasis live. The 90s Mancunian rockers played to an estimated 700,000 people across a series of gigs in Edinburgh, London and Dublin this month, delighting audiences with a string of solid performances and a reliable catalogue of sing-along hits.
Demonstrating the incredible power of nostalgia, the tour is already a huge financial and critical hit, and now continues with dates in the USA, Canada, Australia, Asia and South America. The success of the Oasis reunion would seem to back-up the idea that giving people what they already know is a winning commercial strategy.
In recent years, the entertainment industry and the movie business in particular have leaned heavily on the idea of ‘prior brand recognition’. The idea being that developing a film around a known quantity, be it an existing movie or TV franchise, a successful book or a hit computer game, gives marketers a built-in advantage in capturing the attention of the press and public alike.
This strategy has delivered mixed results: for every crowd-pleasing surprise hit such as the Barbie movie, there are countless other ‘known quantity’ projects that have proved dead on arrival. (I mean, did anyone really need a movie based on the boardgame ‘Battleship’? Based on the box office, the answer is no.)
Indeed, it’s a strategy which is increasingly delivering diminishing returns. In a summer where both DC’s Superman and Marvel’s Fantastic Four movies failed to achieve the heights hoped for them, beleaguered cinema operators were looking at one of their worst summer seasons ever this year – until something happened that no one predicted.
Produced by Sony Pictures and released by Netflix with little fanfare in late June, original animated musical KPop Demon Hunters has gone on to become a true global phenomenon. Set in South Korea and focusing on the adventures of a successful three-piece girlband who battle supernatural forces on the side, the movie, in the few weeks since its release, has been streamed more than a quarter of a billion times, becoming the single most viewed film on Netflix ever. The film’s songs have also stormed the global music charts and, this month, KPop Demon Hunters became the first movie soundtrack ever to have four songs feature simultaneously in the Top Ten of the Billboard Hot 100.
Responding to the unexpected success of the film, Sony and Netflix quickly organised a limited two-day theatrical release for a sing-along version of the film this month. The performances were a sell-out on every screen where the film played, rescuing an otherwise disappointing summer for cinema owners.
The lesson for omnichannel marketers? While it’s tempting to serve up a known and winning formula, something original and unexpected always has a chance to break new ground, reach new audiences and open up fresh opportunities across a wider range of channels and formats than you might have expected.
The KPop Demon Hunters phenomenon will be examined as a marketing case study for years to come and, as the father of a musically-minded nine-year-old daughter, I suspect I’ll be hearing the songs at home for some time yet!
Until next time, here’s to a prosperous September for us all.
Michael Feeley
Editor
New Digital Age
