Movie marketing news, reviews and opinion by Chris Thilk.
Thursday September 2nd 2010

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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.

Getting a post Comic-Con bump

On the one hand some news from Flixster (via THR’s Heat Vision) that Comic-Con has not been, for the vast majority of movies, been a huge word-of-mouth generator isn’t that surprising.

But when you look at what the research seems to have been looking at the sensational headline seems a little less accurate. The chart says it’s tracking “iPhone Searches” and comparing them from one week to the next. That’s a pretty small subset of the general online buzz.

It makes sense that movies like Sucker Punch, which really made a big splash and came out of Comic-Con as a one with surprisingly good buzz, would see such a huge jump. But in this case the baseline is pretty much zero. People knew about the movie but the appearance at the convention coincided with the release of a trailer and some posters and a ton of conversations were generated as a result.

Scott Pilgrim’s Comic-Con bump wasn’t nearly as big because that marketing campaign is almost over and there wasn’t anything new or revelatory which debuted there. Yes, the movie was sneaked to some of the press in attendance but overall the buzz wasn’t nearly as voluminous as it was for, say, The Avengers. At least not based on what I was seeing.

While there were cool props for Captain America, Thor and other movies on display at the convention there weren’t any trailers actually released, nor were there any huge casting announcements. Same for Megamind, which had a panel talk but nothing really new. The news around these movies was more part of the overall press strategy, a strategy that will have longer-term implications beyond a single weekend of iPhone searches.

It’s always good to measure results, but this seems like an odd metric to pull out. I’m positive the number of conversations as defined by tweets, blog posts and such were up for all these movies over the previous weekend so assuming the studios behind these movies are looking at the details they’re probably not sweating this too much. Far worse for the movies are stories that use questionable data to cast a bad light on those movies.

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Expendable nostalgia

Aris at AdAge has a great editorial (8/4/10) on the use of nostalgia in movie marketing campaigns, specifically using the push for The Expendables as a hook to hang his thinking on. But he also looks at how the drive to tap in to nostalgic feelings in the audience is not only influencing the marketing but also the movie-greenlighting process as a whole.

I think Aris’ biggest and best point isn’t that The Expendables isn’t a remake of the 1980′s as movies like A-Team, Transformers and more have been. It’s a movie that appears to have been made in 1986 and dropped through a wormhole to 2010, complete with a cast that is largely filled with action movie heroes from that decade though with a few new guys mixed in for good measure.

The marketing presents a movie that’s irony free, with a healthy dose of kicking your ass in place of a tongue in cheek. Where The A-Team and other movies have offered sort of winking and self-aware versions of franchises we can’t believe we used to watch, The Expendables is a straight-forward reliving of the kinds of movies that were all about body count, the kind that comes as the result of lots and lots of irony-free explosions.

Interestingly I’m not that interested in The Expendables precisely because it seems like the kind of movie I wouldn’t be interested in 25 years ago. So while I admire the campaign – especially the word of mouth effort that Aris rightly points Stallone being at the forefront of – it doesn’t work for me precisely because it plays it completely straight.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08

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Rubbin’ is racin’

A while a go I was quoted in a story about music videos and their place in the movie promotional mix.

While I couldn’t find it at the time, today I came across one of my favorites, the video for “Hearts in Trouble” by Chicago, a song that appeared on the Days of Thunder soundtrack. It’s a great song (IMO) in and of itself and while the video may seem incredibly cheesy you have to keep in mind that when you compare it to the videos from 19 a couple years before this or Twenty-1 a year later this is probably the best of the lot for the band.

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Regular clips, wavy clips and clips for dipping

My latest AdAge excursion is a look at how Hollywood has really amped up the use of extended clips from movies as part of their marketing campaigns.

I’d love to hear from you all – either here or in the comments section at AdAge – as to where you fall on the use of these clips for just about all movies of any size. Everything from mainstream kids fair to adult-oriented independent drams are employing this tactic. Does it work for you? Are there some kinds of movies you watch the clips for and others you don’t?

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