Jenkins on movie marketing and fan efforts

Posted by Chris

October 15, 2007

One of the more interesting sessions at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago last week was the presentation by Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT on how fan participation has changed the entertainment landscape. He mentioned a bunch of good stuff in his talk (you can find his own notes and links here), including the “Browncoats” that got so involved in the marketing of Serenity (only to be back-handed by Universal, but that’s another story).

He also talked about Four Eyed Monsters, billed by Spout as the first feature film to be distributed via YouTube. Jenkins talked about how the internet had been used by the filmmakers to bring together excitement about the movie and the new distribution model.

Since I know Karina Longworth blogs for Spout, and know she follows my Twitter updates I thought she’d be excited to hear about the movie getting mentioned in front of a couple hundred marketers gathered in a ballroom to hear about new media and embracing the audience and such. So I sent her a “@” message to give her the heads up. About an hour later I saw she had written something up about it.

I kind of thought this was cool in and of itself. First we have Jenkins giving a fairly traditional presentation (including slidedeck) in front of a marketing professional conference. But because the right guest blogger was in attendance and latched on to a few key points his talking points got out to a whole new audience of film fans. And the message was spread through a micro-blogging service that allows for status updates and short, concise communications.

Like I said, pretty interesting from my perspective.