Marketing Movies

One reason that theater chains like dealing with the major distributors is that the majors have sophisticated marketing operations. To help reduce the risk of failure, distributors often conduct two types of research before a film is released. Title testing involves conducting interviews with filmgoers in shopping malls and other public places to determine the most alluring name for an upcoming picture. Previewing is a type of concept testing that takes place after a film is completed but before it is formally released. Theatergoers see a preliminary (rough cut) version of a movie and answer survey questions about what they like or don't like about it. The reactions may be used to re-edit parts of the film. The original sad ending of Fatal Attraction, for example, was changed to make it happier after it received negative audience reactions during previews.

For the April 2010 superhero movie Kick-Ass, film distributor Lionsgate launched an innovative marketing campaign across YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. On each site, consumers had access to the same brand content, including official Lionsgate updates, Facebook activity, YouTube comments, and Twitter streams. They were also able to upload and share content accessible through each site.

The campaign was in part an effort to capitalize on the so-called “Twitter Effect,” the notion that Twitter buzz can help or hinder the box office performance of a newly released film. After the films Julie & Julia and District 9 appeared to benefit from positive Twitter buzz—and Bruno to suffer from negative buzz—movie marketers have been hunting for a way to harness the potential powers of the social media platform to their advantage.

In a typical social media campaign, a brand sponsors pages on various sites, but the marketing for each site remains independent of one another. Lionsgate claimed to create the first campaign to sync up sponsored brand pages across different social media sites through a single platform (called Distributed Engagement Channel, DEC). This way, brand marketing and engagement is not partitioned off into unconnected sites. “For example, a user can sign in with their Facebook account on YouTube, pull from their existing Facebook photo albums to create a submission (in this case, their best “Kick-Ass” move), and then once it’s posted, a MySpace user can view and comment on it because the channel is connected across these three sites,” noted Ankarino Lara fromThisMoment, the company that sold Lionsgate the DEC platform. “At a basic level, you can think of DEC as a system that creates one connected community around a brand.”

By allowing the campaign to be rooted to the brand itself instead of to different sites, Lionsgate’s Kick-Ass campaign aimed to make it easy for movie fans to share material about the movie across social media. “The web overall is a social place, but I don’t think fans and users see it in a siloed way,” said Lionsgate’s VP of new media and marketing, Danielle DePalma. “It’s important to have all the buzz and great fan reaction in one place.”

Sources: Andrew Hampp, “Forget Ebert: How Twitter Makes or Breaks Movie Marketing Today,” Advertising Age, October 5, 2009. http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article9article_ id= 139444 (accessed August 4, 2010); Andrew Hampp, “How Lionsgate Plans to Take on ‘Twitter Effect’ for ‘Kick-Ass’,” Advertising Age, March 1, 2010. http://adage.com/madiso- nandvine/article?article_id= 142350 (accessed August 4, 2010). '

CULTURE TODAY WHEN FANS “DEMAND IT”

The low budget film Paranormal Activity was a horror thriller that had spent years in semi-obscurity except to a certain form of cult film enthusiasts. Recently, marketing executives at Paramount decided to use social media to promote the film through an online “Demand It” campaign. The messages encouraged users to demand that the movie be shown in their hometown. Paramount promised that if the film got 1 million demands, it would screen the movie in every town where a person had demanded it. It took less than a week for Paranormal Activity to reach 1 million demands. The result of the “Demand It” campaign was a nationwide rollout of what was once an underground cult film. The film, which never used a trailer or television ad and cost next to nothing to make, grossed over $107 million and became the most profit­able movie in Paramount Pictures history.

Paranormal Activity had already achieved cult status when Paramount picked it up. Do you think that the “Demand It” approach could be used to promote a new movie or is it a technique that should be reserved for movies with some credibility with fans already?

Sources: Andrew Hampp, ‘“Paranormal Activity’ Wins by Listening to Fans’ ‘Demands’: Most-Profitable Film in Paramount’s History Uses Eventful, Twitter to Stoke Web Buzz,” Advertising Age, October 12, 2009. http://adage.com/madi- sonandvine/article?article_id= 139588 (accessed August 23, 2010).

PRINTS AND ADVERTISING. The expenses that distributors incur in getting their films to theaters and marketing them to the public are part of what the movie industry calls P&A, or prints and advertising. The “prints” part means the cost of reproducing the original film negatives to circulate to theaters around the country and around the world. The “advertising” part means the money the distributor spends to publicize and advertise the film.

You're undoubtedly familiar with publicity and advertising for movies—from lavish parties for a film's cast on the day of the movie's premiere with the press in attendance, interviews with the film's actors on TV programs such as The Late Show with David Letterman and Entertainment Tonight, putting previews of the film on You­Tube and MySpace, posting comments about it on Twitter, and giving out free pre­view tickets to college students before a film formally opens. The aim of publicity is to get a favorable “buzz” going about the movie among its target audiences. The aim of advertising is to turn that buzz into actual moviegoing by telling people that the movie is playing near them and urging them to see it.

The flurry of publicity and advertising for a film is intense and short (a few weeks at most), and it takes place before and around the time the movie is released to the theaters. Although marketing can prepare moviegoers for a movie, after the first weekend of its release it is word of mouth—the discussions that people who see the movie have with their friends—that determines whether more people will go to see it. The life of a film in theaters is no more than a few months. The greatest proportion of the money received from a film comes in during the first few weeks; in fact, executives believe that they can predict the total amount of money a movie will make by looking at how it does during that short period of time.

TRACKING Distribution executives often order tracking studies—research on the public's awareness of and interest in a film—beginning two weeks before the film's release and continuing through the film's first month of release. Three times during each of those weeks, a company called National Research Group surveys a random sample of Americans by phone. National's operators read a list of current or soon-to-be-released films to people who say they have recently seen theatrical movies. For every film on the list, the people are asked if they are aware of it and if they want to see it. The film's marketers may use the results, which are broken down by age and gender categories, to determine whether revisions in their publicity, advertising, or even release plans are needed.

All this activity requires a lot of money. On major domestic releases in the early twenty-first century, P&A costs amounted to around half of the film’s negative cost—the total cost of making and editing the movie. According to Variety, the negative cost of 3:10 to Yuma came to roughly $60 million, to which distributor Lionsgate added $27.5 million for prints and advertising.7 In rare instances, marketing a film costs even more than putting it together. Scream, a 1996 Miramax release that became a box office phenomenon, reportedly had a negative cost of about $15 million and more than $20 million of marketing expenses to send it into wide release. In this case, it payed off. Three weeks after its debut, the trade magazine Variety was predicting that the movie would bring in $70-80 million in theatrical receipts.

But not all the money made at the box office comes back to the distributor. Let's look at the exhibitor's side of the story.