At least that I know, there has never been a product placement such as the one in the Speed Racer poster. Some times you can find a watches, a clothes or even a sunglasses brand hidden in the image. But for this time, the creative material execution allows to introduce brands mentioned directly.

If you pay attention to the colored area of these posters you will find a Petrobras logo as part of the street or the racing stadium decoration, this is surely done deliberately as part of a Product Placement agreement of any kind (payed or as a part of a cross promotion agreement).

Petrobras is one of the world’s leading fuel and energy companies, and belongs mostly (more than 55%) to the government of Brazil.

This placement may not probably be in the whole global campaign but at least in countries like Spain or United Kingdom, where there will probably stock-holdders or any kind of commercial relationship with the company.

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As Speed Racer is a title that will be maintained as the original for most of the countries, Warner Bros. has decided to create a teaser poster with an special optical effect.

For those not related with teasers, in movies there are two main types of graphic materials for advertising in movie theaters: movie posters and teaser-posters. The teaser poster refers to a usually shocking creative material that many times does not even include the movie title; it is frequently used for high budget movies to create expectation many months before the movie launch. As for movie posters are the ones used when the release date is close and they always have to include the entire credits block that use to appear on the bottom of the image.

Back to the matter in hand. Speed Racer teaser poster is now in many movie theaters around the world. I’ve just seen it the first time in a movie theater here in Spain and it uses a lenticular printing effect that is used to create a morphing or movement effect in the material where it is used.

As this is a very expensive printing technique (you have to paste an special optical effect plastic to the poster) it is usually seen only in Collector’s or Deluxe Edition DVD packs.

You will not be able to see the effect in this post image, but the effect used tries to transmit a sense of 3-D and movement at the same time. The reason I started the post talking about they keep the original English title in most of the countries is because they are using the same printed material in many countries. So they just had to make one print run. Which makes much more cheap the use of this printing techniques.

This is a very expected movie as it is the last film directed by the Wachowski brothers since the Matrix trilogy which guarantess at least a high visual and technological show. And not only because of this, but also because of what this movie means for the 1970’s and 1980’s generations that grew up with the TV show.

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