Lessons from the 2011 Variety Film Marketing Summit part 2: Marketing strategies

Going to the movies is expensive, especially if you have a family like I do. After adding up the cost of babysitting, dinner, tickets, popcorn and parking, I’m easily spending over $200. If consumers are expected to spend that kind of money, film marketers need to make a compelling argument for their movie. In part one of my Variety Film Marketing Summit report I discussed how film marketers segment potential audiences and define success. In this installment I’ll share some film marketing strategies from the summit.

Strategy #1: Interrupt

Traditional advertising interrupts a viewer’s TV show or movie as part of a value exchange: to receive free programming, you accept messages from the show’s sponsors. Social media may be the darling of the trades and marketing departments, but traditional advertising still does the heavy lifting for movie awareness.

Re-distribute TV spending
Studios spend 70% to 75% of their marketing budget on TV. The budge is split between network, cable and spot ads. But after 50 years of a steady run, TV advertising is finally coming under pressure as a result of studios reducing their TV spend in 2010.

There are a few reasons for this. Attention is growing scarce as DVR, video on demand (VOD) and nearly infinite internet options fight for time. Overall, TV viewership is increasing, but cohesive audiences are harder to find and their ability to skip commercials has been a thorn in the side of all types of broadcast advertising. In response, studios are spending more money in less time. Studio TV advertising dollars for opening weekends have increased from 35% of their budgets to 41%.

DVD downstream revenue, which used to make up for poor box office opens, is disappearing–so even more is riding on opening day. It’s more difficult than ever for movie marketers to be sure their ads are being seen by the time the opening weekend rolls around.

Create must-see movie trailers
66% of homes now have DVRs, which I assumed would be directly hurting movie trailer viewing. Several panelists mentioned that trailers are Tivo-proof, meaning they are worth “un-skipping,” watching and then skipping forward to the show. Trailers are also highly popular online and in movie theaters, although the volume of in-theater promotion is teetering on over-saturation.

Don’t underestimate the power a memorable logo
A great movie logo becomes memorable much faster than standard brands. The Ghostbusters logo, designed by Dan Aykroyd, became a globally recognized icon in a few months, a task that took Coca-Cola several generations to achieve.

Strategy #2: Discover

Assuming the marketers have done their job, I’ve heard of their movie. Now it’s time to decide if it’s worth watching.

Movie reviews
Professional movie critics used to own this space, but now only a handful can collectively move the needle on attendance. 18 years ago, Roger Ebert became a champion of Hoop Dreams, mentioning it repeatedly over several weeks and making it a success. The New York Times gave Bridesmaids a positive review, which helped legitimize this risky “Hangover for women” movie. An A+ rating from Cinemascore almost guarantees an especially long and happy run, as it did for Soul Surfer and The Help.

The Internet has made most local newspaper movie critics less relevant. Only a handful of traditional critics remain. One of the new stars is website Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates film critics’, as well as regular ol‘ movie-goers’ opinions, and spits out an average rating. Rotten Tomatoes’ ratings are now baked into iTunes and directly affect what movies I choose.

Facebook and Twitter are personalizing the Rotten Tomatoes “wisdom of the crowds” model, which provides validation that can only come from trusted recommendations. As summit panelists pointed out, we, as human beings, haven’t changed much–we respond best to recommendations from our friends and family. The new technology simply amplifies this voice, allowing fans to love or hate their movies and spread the word faster and wider.

Video (on demand) kills the DVD store impulse renter
Not long ago, the time consumers spent wandering Blockbuster aisles averaged 23 minutes. Studios started to decorate DVD sleeves with film festival laurel wreathes to market to video store-browsing consumers, hoping they’d notice the talented actors on the shelf. The “film festival discovery” strategy became immensely popular, but has lost steam with the decline of DVDs (Blockbuster recently filed for Chapter 11) and VOD’s rise to power.

Five years ago, VOD was the last resort. The medium relied on cable for a small number of releases, and using it was unintuitive. Now many consumers consider VOD the best way to rent movies–and VOD revenues are growing exponentially, or “hockey-sticking.”

VOD really became popular when iTunes, in addition to changing how people search for movies, offered a much larger catalog than what was previously available. In iTunes and other VOD services, the information about the movie takes precedence over the cover, which means the laurel wreaths don’t show. The result is that the whole film festival awards marketing strategy has little to no effect on VOD consumers.

There are three types of VOD, free (the not-always-legal bit-torrent), subscription (cable, Netflix) and transactional (iTunes). VOD has been steadily taking people away from retail (less DVDs at Walmart) and is allowing for innovations in distribution, which has been great for the indie market.

The best non-Internet PR channels
The biggest PR coup your movie can have is to get the star of your film to host Saturday Night Live. Placement on the cover of New York Times or other major magazines comes next. Awards and exposure from major film festivals is more important for smaller release films than major releases.

Strategy #3: Engage

Sony’s marketing guy talked about Moneyball’s theme of “adapt or die.” In the film, the resource-strapped Oakland A’s beat wealthier teams by reinventing their strategy and outsmarting the competition. What constitutes a radical reinvention of marketing? The only clear answer is engagement through social media, which has been around for less than 10 years. In classic Moneyball style, smaller movie releases spent twice as much of their 2009 budgets (12% versus 6%) than majors on social media.

Moneyball is a great analogy for how major studios’ marketing departments adopted the online marketing strategies that the smaller guys had been doing–it took bigger teams just a few years to mimic how the A’s were using sabermetrics and start beating them at their own game. Indeed, there have been more calls to shift larger portions of media budgets to the Internet to take advantage of its superior demographic targeting and significantly lower price points.

Examples of recent successful movie marketing

Social media is on a tear right now. For example, Zynga, the maker of hugely popular Facebook games such as Farmville and Mafia Wars, has 232 million users and can now rival TV networks for both eyeballs and attention span. Zynga’s new game, the Sims-esque Cityville, reached 100 million users in 43 days.

Paramount recently worked with Zynga to build a promotion for Kung Fu Panda 2 into Cityville where players could put a Kung Fu Panda theater in their city for one week. Players would need to come back daily to collect rent from five different movie characters, providing engagement and exposure when kids (and adults) are happy, focused and receptive. If they earn enough rent, they receive a reward–a Kung Fu Panda that lives in their city.

Additionally, players are encouraged to post to their Facebook or Twitter pages about their process, which engages their friends in the marketing experience. Keep in mind that Paramount marketing didn’t even have a Facebook account until two years ago.

20th Century Fox worked with Rovio Games, maker of Angry Birds, and the Brazilian tourism board to create a Rio version of Angry Birds in possibly the most fortuitous meeting of the minds yet. The marketing campaign was obviously a huge success, generating revenue by drafting off the success of a massive property. I didn’t realizing it, but I recently bought my girls the Rio Angry Birds iPad version (which they love).

The concept of empowering the user was the most frequently mentioned, most wide-ranging benefit of social media. Film Funds is a website that lets movie fans help fund up-and-coming movies. Peter Jackson’s Hobbit blog offers fans a window into the making of the movie. UCSB fans beat out 400,000 other college students to host the red carpet movie premiere of Your Highness, and the studio collected everyone’s emails in the process.

Strategies on the decline

Not all engagement marketing is faring as well these days. Movie websites are a necessary evil, but they are far less relevant than the corresponding Facebook page. Mobile is hyped as the next big move, but marketers aren’t fully impressed. IPhone apps were once all the rage, but the novelty quickly wore off before gaining meaningful traction. The influx of apps created a lot of clutter, which led to the apps requiring marketing, as well. Why spend marketing dollars to market the marketing?

Japan’s mobile infrastructure may be far more advanced than the US, but no great marketing ideas are taking off there. The global mobile infrastructure is also very fragmented. So, for now, there is no single, technology or marketing solution for reaching people.

Groupon’s 2-for-1 movie tickets through Fandango seems like the biggest loser in the social media realm. Moviegoers benefit through cheap tickets, but end up only wanting more discounts and with zero loyalty. This commoditization cheapens the movie-going experience, which is really all that movie theaters have going for them.