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Movie Marketing Madness by Chris Thilk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at MMM.
DVR usage impacting movie marketing
It’s not all that surprising that DVR usage is having an impact on movie marketing efforts (Hollywood Reporter, 8/22/10) or that those marketers are now looking for ways to compensate for that impact. This only follows trends that have been in place for upwards of five or six years and is one that’s been growing as more cable providers offer their own DVR options.
But one of the things I find interesting about the THR story is that the efforts that previously might have gone to TV advertising are instead being directed at online engagement platforms such as Facebook. It’s interesting because so many of those Facebook pages 1) Become outlets for distributing TV spots and 2) have very little actual engagement going on in terms of actual two-way conversations.
The other point that stands out for me is the one about marketers needing to reevaluate the timing of the TV spots they continue to run. Conventional wisdom for movies has always been that the Thursday before a movie opens is the sweet spot (that’s why Thursday has traditionally been home to some of TV’s most popular shows) but now that’s changing. If shows recorded on Thursday aren’t being watched until Sunday then maybe spots need to run earlier.
The reality is that online marketing is great at converting intention but raising awareness is still achieved more often than not through TV for the majority of the audience. That can be true or untrue depending on the movie and its target audience. But while the expectations for what TV advertising can or cannot accomplish might be shifting I’d be surprised to see it disappear or meaningfully diminish in the foreseeable future.
Evaluating the scale
The theories, speculation and other commentary continue to be published in the wake of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World’s disappointing box office debut. In the last week or so there’s been all sorts of ideas floated, from it just generally being a bad year to try and make a movie with such inherent limited geek appeal to the problem being that it didn’t fit into one particular genre (and therefore couldn’t benefit from the best practices developed for the marketing of this, that or the other genre film) to the opinion that the movie didn’t do enough to wink at its own ridiculousness to the audience. It’s also now the latest case study in how social media buzz doesn’t automatically translate to financial success.
While it’s tempting to continue the hand-wringing over Pilgrim’s fate, which, as the AdAge story about social media buzz makes clear, was expected to be bigger based on clues such as excited Twitter mentions and anticipatory Facebook updates, doing so is also an exercise in futility. That’s largely because it’s not the case that this is a bad year for geeks, which is the headline THR assigns to its story. It’s more because the scale of the movies that are being created for niche audiences are outsized compared with those audiences.
The Wrap, in its piece, is right when it says that the movie didn’t fit in to any one genre. Instead it was a mish-mosh of a handful of ideas from different genres, all put together into something wholly unique. But instead of appealing to all the fans from all the source genres it wound up appealing only to those who found that original mix interesting and appealing.
Where the problem wound up occurring is that most of those who have their own movie blogs were in that group. But the percentage of Pilgrim fans in the movie blog community happened to be far greater than the percentage who were likely to “get it” in the general audience. That’s what then caused the outsized hype for the movie before its disappointing opening weekend.
So then we have a problem of scale, one that’s been plaguing Hollywood for the last four or five years. The big movies are REALLY BIG but even those studio productions that are more or less assured to have a limited target audience have budgets – not including the subsequent marketing – that are north of $30 million. So when opening weekend is then $5 million, things get a little dicey.
If movies such as this were treated a bit differently – mainly by being given budgets that were in line with realistic expectations and then release patterns that allowed the movie to live up to whatever potential it truly has – there might be more successes.
There are always going to be movies like Snakes on a Plane and Scott Pilgrim that have great word of mouth but then go on to completely stall upon release. But these can be minimized by evaluating the scale some movies are produced on and then making sure that the movie is hitting as many people as possible to maximize its chances of success.
Entertainment check-ins
My latest AdAge piece takes a look at some of the opportunities that are available for Hollywood movie studios when it comes to the entertainment check-in services such as Miso, Philo and others that are emerging.
These services are hitting their stride as the check-in craze moves beyond merely location and expands to more activity-based actions, with entertainment – specifically movie and TV watching – being chief on the list of such actions.
Facebook diverting fan’s attention
If you’ve been reading MMM for the last six or eight months you’ve probably noticed I’m increasingly frustrated with the official websites that studios are throwing online for their movies. Lately the online efforts just seem half-hearted at best, with the bare minimum of information being provided there about the movie but with major gaps – no profiles of the actors, a weak synopsis, just one of the three trailers – existing.
This seems to be most prevalent with the sites from the major studios, while those movies from smaller distributors usually get a more robust site, likely to compensate for the fact that they’re not doing a ton of advertising and not having huge public relations pushes.
I’d been suspecting that shift away from an emphasis on the official website was coming as the studio marketing teams put more of their attention toward managing a Facebook presence for their movies.
I bring this up because of a report (AdAge, 8/23/10) showing a number of consumer brands who have the top ranking Facebook pages are seeing traffic to those brands’ official websites drop as engagement rises on Facebook.
I’m the first one to say that Facebook ought to be part of a brand’s online social media strategy, provided there are plans for actual engagement and conversation on that page and it’s not a “set it and forget it” attitude that’s being taken. That holds true for both consumer-facing and B2B companies, who can still benefit from the features that Facebook allows for.
But it’s important to remember that Facebook pages are not owned by the brand that creates them. I’ve drawn the analogy before about them being equivalent to a storefont in a strip mall that’s owned by someone else but which is just rented by the brand itself. That means you, as a brand manager, can set the rules for the people who enter the store but the owner of the building can at any time change the terms of the rental.
Just look at the recent brouhaha over Facebook’s elimination of the boxes on user’s sidebars, something that means all the nifty little applications people used to collect are now hidden. The brands that created them have no control over that and now have to realign their strategy with this new reality.
This sort of situation is why, despite whatever numbers there might be thrown out there, it’s still a good idea to have a web presence that is on-domain and completely owned and which the company/brand controls from top to bottom. No one can dictate the terms of service to you on your own website.
There are always people out there (most of whom are just looking for consulting fees) who are going to advise that companies neglect – or maybe even completely skip – the official site and instead focus solely on Facebook. But they’re wrong, just as the same sort of people when they were advising a completely focus on creating a corporate MySpace page. Again, not a bad idea (at the time) but something that needed to be a spoke in the strategy and not the hub.
Instead what needs to be focused on are tactics that can make that owned hub more engaging with the audience.
Let’s look at movie websites, most of which fail the engagement test outside of one or two casual games that might be tacked on to the page.
Instead of creating a more or less static Flash-based page that doesn’t provide any reason for people to come back all that often, what if it were designed in such a way that it were constantly updated and comments from fans and visitors were welcome on-domain. All of a sudden Facebook (or whatever comes next) becomes a component of an overall engagement strategy and not the only piece of that strategy. Even better, the studio creating that improved website owns the engagement that happens there and can dictate its own terms instead of being beholden to Facebook’s.
Outsourcing the sole outlet for engagement is not a long-term strategy. Facebook will eventually be replaced by something else and there will be a whole new set of terms and operating conditions to adjust to. By taking control of where the conversations are taking place there are a world of new opportunities for brands to take advantage of.
