“What Should Lucasfilm Do?”

Scott Kirsner has a list of insanely good ideas for Lucasfilm to ponder as they near the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Making video available for mash-ups and offering the first three movies as digital downloads at a reduced price are just two of those ideas.

Scott’s post is based on the notion that there’s limited digital assets for Indy 4 despite Lucasfilm’s street rep as being on the forefront of technology. But there’s another issue to consider: It will have been 19 years since the last Indiana Jones movie was released. That means the people Lucasfilm and Paramount are hoping will see this new installment – people in the 15 and above demographic – weren’t even born when The Last Crusade was in theaters.

More importantly, those kids have grown up with technology and are now on Facebook, are editing video clips on the PowerBooks and are otherwise tech savvy, largely because they’ve never known a world without easy access to that technology.

Lucasfilm would be wise to use Scott’s short list of brainstorming ideas as the foundation for a digital marketing strategy for Crystal Skull that meets the media usage and consumption habits of this crowd. A series of nostalgia-heavy online videos isn’t going to cut it. This is a campaign that is going to necessitate online components that are engaging and empowering in order to reach anyone under the age of 30.