M&M's/Mars
M&M's/Mars has been a longstanding annual partner/client of Marvel. Since these projects went through the Marvel Custom team, for years all of the M&M's promotions were led by Darren Sanchez and created by his team.
The Challenge: M&M's wanted marketing activations to serve several purposes; Promote new flavors, Celebrate their 75th Anniversary, and sometimes simply to create brand awareness through live events (Comic Cons), social media and online at Marvel.com.
The new flavor of Caramel was promoted in-line with the release of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, in this limited 16-page comic book story featuring the M&M's characters. This story also featured as a "Motion Comic" on Marvel.com, which was promoted through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
The Hazelnut Spread flavor was promoted in this comic story set in the Marvel Universe and starring the M&M's characters.
The Solution: The Custom Deliverables proposed by the team, and which were created include Comic Book stories (Print and Digital), homage covers that were turned into stickers, posters, back-cover comic book Print Ads, and even a rare set of collectible trading cards (available only at NYCC).
The team created a series of annual M&M's comic book covers that were designed as homages to iconic Marvel Comics covers. The example shown (right) is an homage to Jack Kirby's "Incredible Hulk #1" (shown above) cover from 1962.
Our team produced 24 of these homage covers. Examples of these can be seen below, including the finished color version of the one shown above.
Art by Tom Grummett
Art by Tom Grummett
Art by Marc Laming
Art by Ramón Bachs
Art by Tom Grummett
Art by Marc Laming
Art by Marc Laming
Art by Dario Brizuela
Art by Ema Lupaccino
Art by Tom Grummett
Art by Dario Brizuela
Art by Tom Grummett
Art by Sean Ryan
Art by Craig Rousseau
Art by Craig Rousseau
Art by Dario Brizuela
The M&M's sticker sheet was a big hit at NYCC. The stickers all featured the M&M's characters in various action scenes with the common tag line of. "HOW FAR WOULD YOU GO?" The tagline, the concept and the scenarios depicted came from creative lead, Darren Sanchez. The individual images were used in a ten month print campaign as back-cover ads on Marvel Comics.
