While The Five-Year Engagement with Jason Segal and Emily Blunt is poised to take top spot at the box office this weekend, the real fan/brand frenzy is a week away.

Prepare yourselves for Hype Overload: Marvel’s The Avengers movie is opening on May 4th and the plan is for the company to have more than 600 (!) pieces of merchandise tied to the film at Walmart alone. You can be sure every character — Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, The Hulk, Hawkeye and Black Widow — will get his or her toys, gear, and apparel as part of the merchandising blitz.

A great deal, if not all, of these products will be found in the aisles of Walmart, where fans of the film will also be able to use a nifty augmented-reality app tied to the film in order to locate the Marvel-ous merchandise (and not just on a T-Mobile phone, as shown in Walmart's video above).Continue reading...

The NFL and Nike have been gearing up for months for the big unveiling of new uniforms for all 32 teams this week, an opportunity for every team to refresh its image and spirit (and make a ton of extra bucks, to boot) — including the NFL.

And while there were plenty who loved the new looks and plenty who didn’t, the general coverage seemed to agree that the uniforms on the whole didn’t change too dramatically.Continue reading...

As part of its own image evolution, the NFL unveiled its new uniforms today in New York, with a player from each of the 32 franchises modeling his team's look by new league apparel partner, Nike.

According to the Associated Press report, most teams' new cutting edge Nike Elite 51 uniforms (tagline: "Fast is Faster") aimed to combine "tradition with innovation," but one team stood out.Continue reading...

If the Tube system in London confuses you already, you might want to skip heading to England for the Olympics this summer. Just to confuse you a little more, a new map has come out of the Underground with 361 station stops renamed for Olympic greats.

The map is being sold on Transport for London's website prior to the 2012 Summer Games. Each subway stop of the London Underground Olympics Legend map is "renamed" for athletes from different sport, so one is all swimming while another is all track and field. The map was designed by former BBC sports journalist Alex Trickett and sports historian David Brooks.

The duo chose an American athlete to represent the main Olympic venue's stop: swimmer Michael Phelps, whose 14 gold medals make him the most successful Olympian of all time. The station nearby is Cassius Clay, named for the famed boxer who fought in the 1960 Olympics of Rome and won gold before changing his name to Muhammad Ali. Longtime rivals Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are next to each other, with Fed getting the bigger tube stop.Continue reading...

When plenty of people go to a concert, they are ready to shell out for a beer or three, so why not drink a brew that is all about the band that you’re seeing?

The United Kingdom’s Signature Brew is answering the call. Instead of just partnering with a band, sticking their name on some random brew, and selling it to the willing masses, Signature has gone a different route, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The idea is to meet with indie musicians and get a sense of what kind of beer they like and brew something up that actually represents them. As an added bonus, the musicians learn a thing or two about the beer business along the way, too.

Signature is currently only distributing in Europe but is trying to figure out a way it can get those beers to the States easily. After all, America has got a boatload of beer drinkers (even though the U.S. is only 13th on the the list of amount consumed per capital).

The first band to sign on with Signature was The Rifles, whose members tasted 20 beers before they figured out what they wanted their beer to taste like. (Sounds like a fun night.) The brew that came out that, The General, was named after one of their songs and went on sale on the band’s website and at its shows this past winter, Businessweek reports: “Signature Brew’s initial run of 6,000 bottles sold out so fast the company is still scrambling to fill new orders.”Continue reading...

The NFL is always good at bringing the hype. The league has mastered the buildup of everything from draft day right up to the Super Bowl. So why not put the same kind of effort into the fact the league is about to start seven new apparel deals?

According to Ad Age, the NFL Hype Machine™ is in full drive for the switch, which happens next week, with the event being positioned as “an image evolution.” On Monday April 2nd, “NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell will cut the ribbon and ring up the first sale as the league opens an NFL pop-up shop in Manhattan to herald the launch of its new apparel deals,” Ad Age reports. The NFL is referring to the pop-up store — called the NFL Shop at Draft, given than it will be located a few blocks south of the 2012 NFL Draft action at Radio City Music Hall — as nothing less than a "huge NFL energy space."Continue reading...

We have already taken a long look at the extensive official merchandise from the phenomenal film The Hunger Games. Now, a look at a few things that fans can pick up that do not bear the stamp of approval from Lionsgate, Scholastic or any other Hunger Games copyright holder. To Etsy we go!

First up (above): The Hunger Games Capitol Serving Platter ($35) Serve up some delicious nosh during your next Reaping watch party!Continue reading...

We have already looked at how Lionsgate studio marketedThe Hunger Games, an $80 million film which reaped an opening weekend box office of $155 million.

Now, a look at how brands are using The Hunger Games to sell themselves. Call it The Hunger Games Brand Extension Games.Continue reading...