Counteracting a movie’s negative word-of-mouth

Among consumer product brand marketers there’s at least, in most cases, the ability to react to negative word-of-mouth, whether it be online or off. If someone says your toothpaste is made from dog food you can counteract that by tracing the source of the rumor and providing, either through direct contact or through strategic publicity campaigns, factual evidence debunking the rumor. Similar scenarios exist for cars, appliances, children’s toys and most other categories you can think of.

In rare cases when the buzz happens early enough in the process there’s even the possibility that the finished product will be altered to account for push back, especially if it’s coming from the direction of the ideal consumer target market.

Movies, though, present a difficult situation for managing word-of-mouth reactions. To be clear, I’m not talking about a movie’s pre-release buzz (something that can be managed to some extent) but instead focusing on consumer reactions that happen after the first screening is underway and the movie is officially in the hands of the audience.

For one thing, by the time a movie is seen by anything other than an insider group it’s largely locked down and not subject to revisions that might better please the target audience. The exception to this rule would be something like Snakes on a Plane. When the online audience that was championing this B-movie batch of ridiculousness found out that a hotly anticipated line that had become a rallying cry for much of this buzz would not be in the film they protested. Ultimately the filmmakers went back and shot or reshot a scene to incorporate this line.

The second challenge is that the studios and their marketing agencies aren’t combating factual claims like consumer-packaged goods manufacturers mostly are. Instead they find themselves up against subjective opinion, opinion that’s sometimes rendered in language that doesn’t exactly invite high-minded artistic debate. “No it doesn’t” isn’t exactly a powerful retort to “Yo dis movie sux lol” but it’s the most that can be reasonably expected.

The final primary challenge for movie marketers is that each movie lives or dies in a window of only three days. The next weekend will see a whole new batch of films appearing in multiplexes that have been preceded by their own multi-million dollar advertising and marketing campaigns. The compressed window of opportunity means there isn’t a lot of time to gather feedback, quantify sentiment and strategically plan a coordinated response across multiple channels. Instead it means publicists and marketers have to think on their feet, react from their gut and shoot from their hips. (BTW, the above finally qualifies me for entrance in the Cliché Writers Society of America (Motto: Using clichés is as easy as falling off a log) so this is a very special moment for me. Let’s move on, though.)

The first reality to embrace is that in order to do this effectively you will likely get little to no sleep between 12PM Friday afternoon and 12PM the following Monday. So go buy a Starbucks gift card and plan to use it often over the course of those 72 hours.

That’s because there will never be a moment in that window of time when someone isn’t seeing the movie you’ve been working on or reacting to it. Not a one. And you need to be reacting in real time, not two days later because by that time you’re already dead.

Here are a handful of easy things to make sure you’ve done before you head home on Thursday, likely for your last decent night of sleep in the foreseeable future:

Setup your primary RSS feeds: Make sure you’re subscribed to the publication feeds for the major influencers you need to keep an eye on. This should include not only sites that cover the movies or the movie industry in general but also any that specialize in covering the genre your movie is part of. You should already be reading these, but they need to be double-checked and some may need to be added/removed based on their relevancy.
Set up your searches: Save a Google News/Google Blogsearch/Technorati search for keywords important to your movie as a bookmark in your browser. Searches should be for movie title, studio name and any marquee-level talent involved either in front of or behind the camera. Also grab the RSS feeds for these searches and put them in your reader so you can save specific items for later analysis.
Do the same things for Twitter: Go to Twitter Search and again save searches and subscribe to result-based RSS feeds for the instant feedback people are giving their followers.
Know your links: If your movie has been the subject of a lot of pre-release buzz you probably/should have links to key mentions saved somewhere. Make sure you’re monitoring (through Technorati or another similar service) for where those links are popping up in new commentary since those are the people being influenced by that influencer and they’re likely going to be paying attention if they write something new.
Devise a response strategy:

OK, this one needs a little un-packing. What is your response strategy going to be? There are a few options:

Pick your battles: Not every negative bit of feedback is going to require a response. That’s why you’re also going to be buying coffee, donuts and pizza for the interns and staff you can’t live without. They’re going to be the ones you count on to filter through the influx of feedback and flag what’s truly important for you. You should spend some time educating those staff on what to look for ahead of time.
Have something of value to offer: If there’s negative word-of-mouth being spread have something beyond your hat in your hands when you contact the writer. It can be links to something someone else who’s been more positive has said about the movie. It can be passes to hand out to the blog’s audience “Hey, I know you didn’t like the flick but your readers might…” or something along those lines. Basically try to introduce as many potential opinion makers into the mix to counter-act the negative review.
Have fun with it: Yes, your job depends on the movie being a success but in your heart of hearts you know that X scene is the most ridiculous thing put on film or that a particular actress is just awful in her role (in the case of Watchmen both of these things applied) so don’t try to act otherwise. Acknowledge it (most online writers aren’t assholes and won’t burn you as a source if you say “I totally agree with your take on her performance.”) and move one and ask about the rest of the movie. If a reviewer’s opinion is based on one or two things, see if you can ask them to write a second review that takes that out of consideration.

Of course it’s going to be up to you and your team to decide what strategy is best for each particular situation. These aren’t hard and fast rules, but instead are offered here as thought-starters.

The major stumbling block in counteracting negative word-of-mouth is that precious little of it happens online, despite the bleating of some industry pundits. If a teenager comes out of the movie and immediately text-messages his five best friends that a movie isn’t worth seeing, that’s communication you can’t see and therefore can’t work to manage. The good news is that no one can so even if you don’t feel better about that reality at least you can hopefully find some small comfort in the knowledge that you’re not the only one suffering.

At the very least engaging in a round of outreach and contact-establishing around a movie’s online buzz is an activity that has the potential to yield long-term benefits. If you know who your influencers are and who is willing to engage in a conversation (those two groups don’t always overlap) you have built a foundation for future word-of-mouth efforts and publicity campaigns. These are people who you can tap later on with future movies for screening opportunities, promotional swag giveaways and other points of contact. If you can’t turn around their opinions about this movie, building a relationship with them might allow you to tap them as enthusiastic partners or even advocates for the next one down the line. And there’s always a next movie.

I’d be interested to hear if there are any instances of a studio marketer successfully turning the tide of negative word-of-mouth around a movie, as I’m not aware of any off the top of my head.