Pictured left to right: John Ewart, Art Director, Disney; Lon Moeller II, President, Broadcast, Open Road Entertainment; Vincent Aricco, Creative Director, Disney Channels Worldwide

Disney XD’s animated series Star Wars Rebels takes place at a perilous precipice along the Star Wars universe’s timeline, a point at which the evil Galactic Empire is securing its grip on the galaxy. But the even more perilous precipice was back on Earth, where an enormous network of creative and marketing teams had to navigate a global launch campaign for the show that was vast in scope yet precise in execution.

Disney Channels World Wide creative director Vincent Aricco and Disney art director John Ewart visited Lucasfilm in San Francisco in the early stages of developing the campaign. There, they could “assure their content team we weren’t going to put Mickey Mouse ears on their characters,” said Aricco at Thursday’s PromaBDA: The Conference session “Star Wars Rebels: Igniting a Global Launch.”

But more importantly, they had the chance to immerse themselves in the Star Wars realm and in particular, some of the films’ original concept art and accessories by famed designer Ralph McQuarrie – whose work is the inspiration for Rebels’ look and feel. This was located in a remote warehouse where Lucas has created an archive of props from every Lucasfilm production.

“All the stuff from Willow is just sitting out on rows and rows of shelves,” said Aricco. “The Ark of the Covenant is there… but obviously we were there to see the Star Wars stuff. We got to hold the actual light saber belts.”

For diehard fans Aricco and Ewart, the field trip was a dream come true, but it also strengthened the campaign that ensued. In general, said the session’s host Jill Hotchkiss, VP of marketing and creative for Disney XD and the Walt Disney Company, creative teams should “push to get involved with the creators of the show. It makes your spot so much more immersive.”

Aricco said that when it came time to cull pitches for Rebels, “we didn’t want your average plot-based clip spot.”

One of those pitches came from Open Road Entertainment, whose first thought, said session participant Lon Moeller, the agency’s president of broadcast, was “Oh my god, Star Wars. There’s going to be a million eyeballs on this.”

Open Road, he continued, likes to send out blasts to all its editors when a project comes in, which lets them respond in their own way and showcases who is passionate about the brief.

“That gives really good creative when someone has added investment,” he said. Needless to say, Open Road won the pitch.

What followed was a series of Rebels promos that cleverly used different combinations of Rebels footage to hit different touch points. Spots involving the grumpy droid Chopper, for instance, highlighted the comedy in the show, while another spot featured the Boba Fett-like graffiti artist Sabine in order to spotlight Rebels’ strong female characters. And a “Generation Dads Sell” spot utilized some of the show’s more nostalgic elements to get the original generation of Star Wars fans invested, and also willing to usher younger generations into the new world it presented.

Other youth-oriented elements of the campaign included a Lego partnership, lunchboxes and a rare in-school educational presence that dovetailed beautifully with a lunar eclipse a couple days before the launch of season one.

The campaign as a whole, concluded Hotchkiss, was “a case study in collaboration” that was facilitated by clear communication and boundaries from the get-go. Disney, she said “established ourselves as the boy experts” and Lucasfilm “were the fan experts.”

Image courtesy of Image Group LA.

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