Mahou’s Wikipeli, a 2.0 movie

In Spain, even though it’s not as hard as advertising tobacco brands, when advertising alcohol there’s always a limit that you can’t push; for instance, on TV commercials you can show the product but no one can be seen drinking it. That is why many of these brands do branded entertainment instead of focusing on creating ideas about their products’ USP. One of the most notable examples of this kind of advertising is Mahou, a beer brand that has been doing interesting things online for several years, first with Herraiz y Soto doing their interactive and now working with DoubleYou.
This year’s campaign is called “La Wikipeli” (“The Wikimovie”), in which Jose Corbacho and Juan Cruz (two famous comedians in Spain) are preparing a new short-film whose plot, characters, scenes, and so on, are chosen by users taking polls, sending videos or commenting the whole process and deciding things on-the-fly.

From choosing the name of the main character…

… to pick up the perfect actor/actress for each role (like this candidate trying to be the perfect pick for a cocky PR girl)

Or even hilarious situations of people wanting to be devoured, the two main directors looking for a restaurant to provide the catering services or asking you to reuse that furniture stuff that you use no more at home; in the end the site is a funny process that is not limited to just one 5-10 minutes microsite experience but that keeps growing and growing while the thing goes on.
The only thing i found regrettable is that, besides a YouTube channel, this might be the kind of project that could use social platforms like Facebook, MySpace or Tuenti to make the experience bigger, not just about providing stuff for the site but allowing people a place to look for others to vote them as the perfect ones for each role or things like that, but i didn’t find any Facebook fan page nor a group, just two “users that can be added as friends” but that have no friend actually. The same goes for using mobile platform and RSS feed, or the lack of them. I mean, when something can become so big it should be expanded, otherwise is felt constrained within a single site, being the idea exactly the opposite as it tries to be spread.
But anyway it’s a really cool idea, and even being in spanish language it seems interesting to me the mechanics of interacting, and also the way of using celebrities in a campaign, not making them as aspirational characters, but making them one of us. I’m curious too about the final result, as the people appearing in the production process are so… nuts? Looks like they’re really eager about appearing in the final film, hope it’s released soon.