Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor behind Ali G and Borat, is back on the big screen with The Brothers Grimsby (or just Grimsby in the UK). To promote his new movie he prepared a great parody of Apple keynotes. We all know Apple has this amazing marketing approach in their product launches and ads. The previous characters he played are talked about as products that led him to create “The Nobby” or the product name for Grimsby.

Is it a good marketing Strategy?

The Good: Content

Content in the video is great. A very funny storyline without overdoing it. There is also great attention to detail which makes it more realistic. As an Apple fan boy I can say the impression is quite accurate. He even matched the outfit style of Apple’s design guru Jony Ive‘s which works perfectly well with his British accent (Ive is British too)!

Sacha Baron Cohen (left) and Jony Ive (right)

I’ve seen a lot of Apple parodies and there is only a few I enjoyed but that is one worth sharing whether you enjoy its parody aspect or Sacha Baron Cohen and his characters.

The Bad: Distribution

The video is only uploaded on the Twitter account of The Brothers Grimsby movie.Even though Twitter can be a great engagement platform it doesn’t really work as a central hub for a video. Sharing it on other social platforms is not ideal at all because it’s recognized as a tweet not a video. This restrains the viral potential of the activity which is too bad. That video could be quite popular on Facebook but for it to pick up people should be able to share it as a Facebook native video or at least a YouTube one. This is the kind of video that should be easy for users to watch.

Now of course someone could rip it off and upload it on one of those channels but that’s definitely not ideal for Sony Pictures. They would rather keep ownership and control of their media assets.

All in all, a great video that should be uploaded to Facebook or YouTube so we can share it.