Movie marketing and the 30-second spot
Last night I saw a television commercial for Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix. While it’s a pretty good spot (I actually kind of got tingles when he walks up to the microphone and says, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”) I was a bit surprised to see a commercial for it.
That got me thinking about the place of the 30-second TV spot in the movie marketing mix. The only reason, I suspect, that Walk the Line was getting promoted in this way was because it’s going after the same audience (and Oscar voters) as last year’s critical and box-office hit Ray. Other than that I think it’s rare to see something that isn’t a blockbuster tent-pole release get television advertising. The movies that need television exposure the least are the ones that get it the most.
See advertising on television costs a lot of money. Networks have convinced Madison Ave. and their west coast brethern that TV ads are a great way to reach a lot of people very quickly and with a minimum of effort. For movies, all they need to do is cut down a two-minute trailer in 30-seconds, slap the opening date and the rating on there and they’re set. The problem with this model is that more and more people have DVRs and are skipping the commercials. The audience is also increasinly multi-tasking while the TV is on (I was ironing shirts while watching The Daily Show for instance) and so their full attention is not going to the TV. All those factors combine to show that the actual message penetration is not what it once was.
The big-budget releases are also the ones with the biggest marketing budgets and so, since there’s all that money lying around, why not spend it on TV ads? The reason these are the movies that need it the least is that it’s exactly these kind of movies that are going to be featured on the entertainment gossip shows, have features written about them in mass-market entertainment magazines and - thanks to corporate affiliation - also get some play and promotion via news networks. Awareness of these titles is not the problem. If anything, they suffer from overexposure.
It’s the smaller releases that still need TV advertising. How many people knew about Heights (which I just watched, by the way) before it opened? I don’t know if there was a single TV commercial created for that movie despite the fact that it could have legitimately benefitted from one. The problem is that it was an independent movie with a modest budget and a relationally modest marketing budget. It relied greatly on word of mouth and creating fans out of a few influential critics who trumpeted the movie to their readers.
Now I’m not saying the TV advertising is the end-all-be-all of movie promotion. Far from it. As I said earlier there are a number of reasons why movie studios (and all other advertisers) should be moving away from television. But how much would one strategically placed TV ad benefit small movies - as long as the ads contain a strong call to action, such as prompting people to visit the movie’s website?
Is there a solution to the conundrum of the movies most in need of mass-marketing being those who can least afford it? Not one that I can think of. The budget issue is just too huge to overcome and unfortunately there’s no way to go into the future to see which small movies will become big hits. They still need to rely on word-of-mouth and smart alternatives that don’t have quite the reach of TV. There are a number of such solutions out there but I haven’t seen many movies latch on to them yet.
[Respects to Joseph Jaffe, who really pioneers the phasing out of the 30-second spot and has got me thinking along these lines in just about every regard.]
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