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Movie Marketing Madness by Chris Thilk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at MMM.
Movie Marketing Madness: Going the Distance
Long-distance relationships are hard. Something about never being able to actually see the person you’re dating and communication being awkward after a while…it all sounds, quite frankly, ghastly. I’ve never been in one myself, but that’s what I hear at least from the few friends who were in some kind of long distance relationship. These rarely worked out because there was always lots and lots of suspicion going around on both sides about what the other person was doing while so far away, most of it well-founded.
Making a long-distance relationship work is the premise of Going the Distance, a new romantic comedy starring Justin Long (he’s a Mac) and Drew Barrymore. The two meet in New York City and begin seeing each other, really enjoying each other’s company and definitely feeling a spark. But then she has to move to San Francisco just six weeks after they begin dating. Determined not to let the miles come between them, though, they decide to keep it going with all the inherent problems such an arrangement creates.
The Posters
The movie’s one poster isn’t all that interesting but it does show more or less exactly what the audience can expect from the film. Long and Barrymore are making goggly eyes at each other as they stand there about to make out against a brick wall. On that wall has been painted a scene combining the two locations they’re going to be living in, SF and NYC as a way to set the audience’s expectations for where the story takes place.
It’s a bright poster that makes it clear that all you can really expect from the movie is a light, funny movie with a couple of actors who rely heavily on charm to see them through. So in that respect, despite whatever design shortcoming there might be, it works.
The Trailers
The first trailer starts off on the first date between the main couple, where he’s charming and funny and she’s just eating it up, something seemingly designed to confirm to the men in the audience that it’s true when women say they’re looking for a guy with a good sense of humor despite the fact that’s totally not true and all of them really just care about…
…I may be veering off course here.
The rest of the trailer shows them deciding to stick it out despite the distance and then encountering all the problems that go with that, including annoying friends, a busy-body sister the pent up frustrations of not having your significant other near to you.
But despite the sometimes serious looks on the character’s faces, the trailer never really loses its upbeat tone. There are still lots of shots of having fun and joking around and the music that plays over all that keeps things on a light note.
A second trailer was released that hit many of the same notes but used different scenes and a different arrangement of the narrative to do so.
We see clips from many of the scenes we did in the first trailer but different excerpts from those scenes. We also get a lot more of the interaction between Garratt (Long) and his friends, something that I’m interpreting to mean the studio is going after guys and trying to sell this as amusing for them as well as mushy for the ladies.
The key component of this trailer is that it really shows off Charlie Day as one of Long’s friends. Based on this he apparently steals every scene he’s in.
Online
The official site opens with a recreation of the poster’s key art and then begins playing the second trailer automatically.
First up in terms of content is the “Synopsis,” which gives visitors a nice overview of the movie’s story, not that there are a lot of twists and turns that were hinted at in the trailers. But it’s decently written and then talks about not only the movie but the credits of the director and more.
“Photos” has about 18 stills from the movie, including a couple of behind the scenes shots. “Video” has both trailers, two TV Spots and a video for the song “If You Run” by Boxer Rebellion, one of the songs on the soundtrack as well as a behind the scenes video from the shooting of that video.
There’s information on the cast and crew as well as some Production Notes under the “Cast and Filmmakers” section, which is surprisingly robust considering some of the efforts I’ve seen on sites of late.
“Downloads” is where you’ll find a handful of Wallpapers and Icons to grab if you so choose. “Soundtrack” has information and samples of the songs on the movie’s soundtrack, obviously. Finally, “Partners/Sweepstakes” has information on companies that have partnered with the movie for promotional purposes as well as links to sites that were giving away prize packs of movie merchandise.
There’s also quite a lot on the site in terms of fun activities.
“DJ Your Hook-Up” lets you select what kind of whoopee you’d like to make and where and then gives you a playlist of songs you can play or then buy.
“Getting to Know You” lets you fill in the answer to a question like the kid you’d be asked on a first date or rate the answers provided by others.
“Date Planner” is actually a Facebook app that lets you create a special date with the person you’re away from.
Lastly, the “Long Distance Relationship Quiz” lets you see if you’re the type of person who could survive such an arrangement.
The movie’s Facebook page is pretty good, with lots updates on where and when the cast would be appearing on their promotional outings as well as photos, videos and the other details that have become standard on these pages.
Advertising and Cross Promotions
The movie certainly didn’t lack for TV advertising, with at least two or three spots running in regular rotation, all of which were variations on the themes of the trailers, showing the couple meeting, deciding not to split just because one of them was leaving and then getting into all sorts of hijinks, including trying to get it on on her sister’s table, a gag the trailers and commercials come back to often.
Listed on the site are a number of companies, raining from Shuttle Computer, which is running a sweepstakes giving away one of their ultra-slim PCs to Skype, which sells itself as being able to connect far-apart people over VOIP and video chat.
Also included here Sprint, Southwest Airline and Arden B., which is running a promoting giving away movie tickets with $75 purchases.
Other than Arden B. and Shuttle there’s no information on specific promotions given on the websites of the companies.
Media and Publicity
The cast, especially Long and Barrymore, have been going gangbusters on the promotional circuit raising awareness of the movie, but there hasn’t really been a wave of publicity about the movie that was designed to cut through the clutter. I would imagine by virtue of its strong advertising campaign and other activities there’s high enough awareness of the movie in the target audience but from what I’ve seen there haven’t been a lot of press stories run.
Overall
A completely pleasant and charming campaign for a movie that I suspect is completely pleasant and charming. Your mileage may vary depending your particular tolerance for the romantic comedy genre in general, the level of your animosity toward Justin Long and other factors. But looking at it from top to bottom it’s not a bad push for a movie that has the potential to pick up the audience that felt disappointed by The Switch a couple weeks ago.
Movie marketing advertising spending drops
Overall movie marketing spending was down about 6.6 percent in the first two quarters of 2010, according to recent numbers on measured media dollar allocations from Kantar Media, reports AdAge (8/31/10).
While overall spending dropped some sectors saw increases, especially outdoor advertising, which grew from $48.9 million in the same period of 2009 to $58.9 million this year. Digital was also up slightly (about $1.2 million) as was national spot radio.
But major cuts were made to TV of all stripes, from national to the spot market to cable. That may have something to do with the face that DVR-based time-shifting is happening more and more, making those TV spots less attractive because they’re less effective. Other media buys, then, are being sought to take the place of TV advertising not only because of the DVR but also because audience fragmentation makes it harder to reach people.
Hampp’s AdAge story also contains a number of interesting quotes from media executives, either movie marketers, digital marketers or publisher CEOs. Their takes on what’s most effective right now varies and, unsurprisingly, seems to be reflective of what their job is. So some consider TV to still be the most effective outlet for mass reach while others can’t emphasize digital executions enough.
Movie Marketing Madness: The American
Last year we saw George Clooney play a man who enjoys being a lone wolf. His character in Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, spent 320+ days in the air flying from one place to the next working on laying people off, for which he needed to be as dispassionate as possible about not just the damage he was inflicting on others but also his own life, which was filled with as few accouterments and connections as possible. He could move from one place to the next on a moment’s notice, get the job done and be out before the dust cleared.
His character in this week’s new release, The American, seems to bear more than a little resemblance to Bingham. In this movie, though, he plays a contract killer who works on his own much of the time. When he tries to take a vacation from the killing he winds up in a small Italian village where he tries to find some piece, befriending a priest and beginning a love affair with a beautiful woman. But the violence he’s perpetrated all his life follows him to this idyllic location and he finds himself not the hunter but the hunted.
The Posters
The poster is a wonderfully retro affair with its minimal use of color and other design elements. Clooney is front and center, running toward the camera with gun and in hand and a very stern look on his face. The combination of those two things and the loose suit he’s wearing give the audience the impression that he’s a spy or some other sort of similar operative. And the large woman’s face that forms the background makes it clear there’s a woman involved in the plot who, it can be safely assumed, is going to make life difficult for Clooney’s character.
The Trailers
The trailer is all about making Clooney seem as cool and collected as possible and it works on that front as well as presenting a compelling case for seeing the movie. We start out eavesdropping on a phone call between Clooney and someone else. Clooney wants out of his life, which we later see involves lots of violence, but he’s convinced to take one last job. So it’s off to Italy where we assume he’s stalking his prey but where he also meets not only a couple of beautiful ladies – who likely aren’t what they seem to be -but also an old priest who he strikes up a friendship with. It’s clear there’s danger in the air Clooney navigates around Europe and we see lots of high-power rifles being aimed and then lowered for any number of reasons.
We also get quite a bit of background on Clooney’s character, with his employer stating that he as a long list of enemies, a sequence showing him cleaning his weapon (not a metaphor) while the priest talks about him having the hands of a craftsman and other such hints. All in all it’s an effective trailer that does a good job of showing the movie as being a character study, albeit one with lots of action, sex and intrigue.
A second, much-shorter trailer – it was only 48 seconds long – really boiled the movie down to its essence: Clooney is some sort of high-precision assassin with someone gunning for him, a couple lovely ladies in the mix and a priest who he has an unusual friendship with. It’s awfully short, not much longer than a TV commercial, and so doesn’t break any new ground or really do much of anything that’s interesting other than show off those core three or so main selling points.
Online
The movie’s official website is actually quite a nice production.
The first content section is “The Story” and is where you’ll find a good overview of the movie’s plot and who all the characters are. Information on the people who portray those characters and then those behind the camera can be found under “Cast & Crew.”
There are about 20 stills from the movie, including a few with director Corbijn, in the “Photos” section. “Videos” has both trailers, a handful of TV Spots and some extended clips as well as a featurette.
More information on the movie can be found in “In Depth,” which has some Focus-produced articles that turn the spotlight on Clooney and Corbijn especially. There’s also the “News & Press” blog for the movie that has links to stories about the movie, a blog that confirms what I’ll say later that there wasn’t exactly a ton of press around the movie.
The official site also hosted a blog written by Corbijn that has him sharing updates from the set, talking about working with the actors and other anecdotes. Not surprisingly it features plenty of photos taken by Corbijn, all of which of course look great.
The movie’s Facebook page is pretty good as well, with plenty of updates about the movie’s marketing and other actives, with lots of people commenting that they’re excited about the movie coming out.
Advertising and Cross-Promotions
For a movie that has a distinctly artistic feeling it was a little surprising to see a handful of TV spots created. I guess it shouldn’t have been considering Clooney is the star here. The spots present Clooney as some sort of mysterious character who has a troubling secret but the chase scenes seem to be an attempt to give it a Bourne-esque feel for the audience who might be more inclined to see him as an international man of mystery than as a troubled retiring assassin.
Media and Publicity
The movie got a bit of publicity but not the kind that preceded Up in the Air or some of Clooney’s other movies. Some of the bigger stories (outside of those about Clooney’s love life and other personal matters) included a look at just how vastly European the movie’s production truly was (Los Angeles Times, 8/29/10) and then, just before release, the fact that Clooney was awarded the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award (Hollywood Reporter, 7/21/10) for his efforts in that area, including the recent “Hope for Haiti” campaign.
Overall
There’s a lot to like about this campaign, mostly in the realm of its efficiency. What I mean by that is that each component of the campaign does a lot without there being a lot. So that one poster really makes an impact that you don’t notice there’s just the one. Likewise with the trailers – you don’t need that second one since the first does a good job of highlighting the major selling points of the movie without overdoing it.
The website is focused not on flash and sizzle but instead on just showing off what it’s going to take to sell the movie. While there may not be a lot of extras there is lots of information about the movie in the form of news stories and other write-ups that add depth to the marketing. So while it’s not the biggest scale of marketing – though there was plenty of TV advertising done in the last couple of weeks prior to release – it does convey its key messages pretty well. All that remains is to see if the right audience was listening.
3D presentation and the ticket price issue
One of the more interesting narratives from the last year or so is the one around the pricing of movies at the box-office. Specifically, with 3D presentations becoming more and more common the movie industry finally has something that it hasn’t for a long time: variable pricing.
(And no, I’m not counting matinee/evening show differentiations here. I’m talking about walking up to the window and having a choice between Price A and Price B for the same product depending on how you want it presented.)
According to The Wrap, average admission price is up about five percent this year, thanks largely to 3D, which costs you more at the ticket window. But, as this story (Hollywood Reporter, 8/26/10) speculates, there’s a consumer backlash that’s going to hit now or going to hit later, mostly because the Hollywood studios have been converting all sorts of garbage into 3D and then expecting people to pay more for it.
But if Hollywood and their business partners in the exhibition industry are serious about maintaining this pricing model they’re going to have to do what every other consumer industry does: Make it part of the marketing and then occasionally run price-based promotions.
3D presentation is already part of most movie’s marketing campaigns. Any film getting the third-dimensional treatment will have that prominently displayed on the posters, in the trailers and everywhere else.
But exhibitors are going to have to get in the game here and begin making the case for why seeing it in 3D is worth the extra coin. More than that, they’re going to have to start incentivizing this behavior with the good movies so that it carries over into the not-so-good releases. And to do so they’re going to have to adopt some of the same price promotion strategies that other retailers do. Otherwise 3D will die on the exhibition side of the equation long before all the planned 3D movies hit screens.
After the Campaign: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
After reviewing the marketing campaign for Brief Interviews With Hideous Men I came away with the sense that the movie would be an uncomfortable viewing experience. While many aspects of the campaign came off as comedic – especially the trailer, which featured clips of some of the interviews, many of which seemed to be funny – it more or less came off as a black comedy of sorts.
But the movie itself is much darker than that, truly showing the characters in it – especially the men – to be hideous. There aren’t more than one or two real laugh-out-loud moments in the running time. Instead there are plenty of moments that will make you squirm uncomfortably in your chair.
Many of those moments come from the same scenes that seemed more straight-forwardly funny when excerpted in the trailer. But in their entirety and with the context of what’s fully being said they come off as a lot less charming and likable, which is the entire point of the movie.
The major issues between the campaign and the actual film come in that many traditional narrative structures are thrown out in the movie that appear to be pretty standard in the trailer and rest of the marketing. Recollections of a character seem to be blend into one another and it’s unclear at various points whether what we’re seeing is actually happening. But in the trailers all this looks very cut and dried.
Did the campaign misrepresent the movie? Not intentionally. But with a movie that explores such ugly subject matter and is setup in a less than traditional way in terms of story-telling, it’s only natural that some nuances are going to be lost in the marketing. In some cases, such as this one, what’s lost is a lot of context, which can lead to a jarring experience for the viewer.
That’s why the press campaign for movies like this are so important for people to be clued in to. I had a better sense of the movie’s true tone from my reading of some of the reviews and other buzz that came out of its Sundance Film Festival appearance than I did from watching the trailer.
