Disney: a playbook of trust
I found a book of Disney movie posters yesterday and it reminded me, especially the older ones (from 1937 and 1946), of Meet Cute’s posters which we create for each story. I often talk about how Meet Cute is building the “Disney” of rom-coms, so I took some time to reflect on this specific example of similarly, and analyze how Disney transitioned their posters across almost a century of brand-building and storytelling.
The first few posters were formulaic with “Walt Disney’s” in big block letter across the top, the “title of the series” + “presents” + “the title of the story”. The color scheme is bold and grabby, and the subject of the art takes up about 60–70% of the poster. Note that your eye is first drawn to “Walt Disney” — the hero brand — in both of these. In the 1930s and 40s, it seems that Walt Disney was what people were supposed to remember when they looked at a poster, more so than the individual stories and characters.
Then, over time, the hero brand “Walt Disney” moves down on the poster and instead the “where” and “how” are brought to the forefront. With new technology and formats (“motion picture”, “technicolor”), the posters boasted that Disney was on the forefront of storytelling and using cutting-edge processes to make them. The artwork takes up more of the poster since the characters start taking center stage as opposed to the company producing the characters. Still, bold and bright.
In the mid-2000s, Ratatouille and the knives take up closer to 90% of the poster, and Disney Pixar is in much smaller font. Same with Wall-E. They no longer have to build up their reputation and are taking bigger risks with the creative by focusing on a specific scene to draw audiences in.
Finally, we get to the mid- 2010s and we can see that the creative takes up close to 100% of the poster, because additional context outside of the creative is not needed anymore. We already know what we’re going to get with a Disney movie with nothing but a super pixel-ized face and a massive snowflake on the cover. We’re going to get happiness and family time served up in a 1.5 to 2 hour package.
Good brands take time to build up and trust. Only after Disney established trust with their brand through consistency, did they start pulling individual story titles to the limelight. Before that, they focused on building the hero brand because people needed something continuous to hold onto and trust. The progression of these posters is telling of the journey entertainment and media companies are on to build up the reputation to be able to move the brand to the background, until it can disappear altogether because trust is already built between audience and epic characters and their stories.
