Movie Marketing Madness

Movie marketing news, reviews and opinion by Chris Thilk.

What Facebook’s new ad formats mean for movie marketers

If you follow the marketing world at all – and that’s not an over-statement – then you’ve likely read numerous accounts of the new advertising platforms being offered by social networking site Facebook. If not here’s a quick primer:

Facebook has unveiled a three-pronged approach to advertising on the site. First is Social Ads, which allows advertisers to target their ads based on the publicly-available data people put on their profiles. This is pretty traditional and not all that innovative save for the fact that Facebook is now admitting and embracing the idea of user data mining by advertisers.

Second is code-named Beacon and allows companies to create brand- or product-specific profile pages. Creation of the pages is free, with the hope on the part of the company being people will interact with those pages, sending by-default-branded updates to their friends through the shared feeds. This, it’s felt, will give those updates the ring of endorsement from individuals which hopefully contains more weight than an ad. Companies can also purchase ads that run below those update items.

Finally, the Insight product allows companies to track the performance of both their branded pages and their advertising.

So how can movie marketers fully take advantage of these new systems, while at the same time not honking off the Facebook user base?

Right now on Facebook movie studios have adopted one of two (or both) basic strategies, widgets or applications. Applications are actual miniature programs that run within the Facebook platform and do something that encourages interaction between members, whether it’s the sharing of music playlists or challenging friends to a coin toss. Widgets, on the other hand, are similar to the kind of widgets you’d put on you iGoogle homepage or blog sidebar. They focus more on presenting one or a handful of condensed features – usually drawn from an official website – that the user interacts with but which don’t stretch into the larger network very much.

Whenever someone adds either one of these things, a status update appears on their profile and is sent to their friends via their feed. The new brand pages work just like that. Every time you friend a brand’s page or buy something from that page it shows up in your feed. And every time that profile updates with something it shows up in the feeds you’re following.

So for studios the opportunities are plentiful.

Let’s say Universal Studios sets up a page for the studio as a whole. I go and add that profile to my list of friends. Universal can then post links to new websites they launch or other updates, all of which I’ll see when I log into Facebook. They can use their profile to invite people to screenings. They can use it to offer screener DVDs. Anything. All of these will show up in the profile updates of those who interact with the page, accomplishing (more or less) the goal of getting the endorsement of those members who are spreading the word to their friends.

For the more straight-ahead ads, let’s say I’ve recently rented Spider-Man 3 from Netflix and am showing that on my profile through a third-party app. Universal could theoretically see that and assume I’m a fan of comics and (hopefully) comic adaptations and serve me up an ad for Wanted, which is based on a graphic novel. They’ve looked at my profile and made assumptions (the best you can really do) based on that. If that does turn out to be the case I can follow that ad to the studio’s profile and grab the Wanted trailer widget and add it to my own site.

And through the Insight analytics back-end Universal can trace that entire interaction pattern.

The trick is, as I eluded to earlier, not honking off the users. No one – I don’t care what surveys say – likes advertising. So the key will be to continue to provide value to the user. What that is and what it looks like is going to depend greatly on the brand – in our discussion a movie – being promoted. But, as with the No Country For Old Men “Coin Toss” application, ideally it’s something contextual to the movie and interesting in how it allows for people to interact with their friends.

And that’s the goal – to enhance how people are talking to their friends on the site and to try and not get in the way of that. After all, as Matthew Ingram said, I’m not actually friends with your brand. I’m friends with my friends. But people do love wearing concert and otherwise branded t-shirts to express their enthusiasm and this allows them to do that within the framework of their social network contact list.

The closest analogy to all this is MySpace and how movie marketers rushed over the last couple years to create MySpace profiles for their movies. But the closed nature of MySpace didn’t allow for anything that could facilitate cross-member communication. Yeah, members could add branded skins but that wasn’t communicated to the person’s friends in any way. And it didn’t actually improve anyone’s experience on the site.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Sony Pictures is among the advertisers who signed on to Facebook’s new ad platform at launch. Blockbuster just launched their own widget, something not even Netflix has, although a number of unofficial Netflix apps exist. Fandango wants to make sure they’re in on the game, launching a ticket-buying application studios and others can add to their corporate profiles.

If you’re wondering how exactly all this works, Forrester analyst and Friend of MMM Jeremiah Owyang has gone through both the profile and Social Ads process and lays out just how user-friendly, from an advertiser point-of-view, this really is.

It’s going to be some time before each movie studio – or any other marketer – finds what works for them on Facebook. But everyone would be wise to follow Jeremiah’s overall POST social media strategy. That is, figure out who the People you’re trying to reach are, define the Objectives for the campaign, devise a Strategy and then – and only then – decide on a Technology that fits in with what you’re trying to do.

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