FilmPlug

In a daring move by Newmarket, the official site for The Nines is essentially a blog. Now, Fox Searchlight and others have fully embraced 2.0 features, adding social media content, aggregating, and otherwise evolving with the latest trends, but here they've stripped it all down to one of the barest-of-bones movie websites in recent memory. All the same content is there, but it's presented in a familiar blog format with next to no Flash animation and I gotta say... it's refreshing.

Judging from the trailer, it seems this 2.0 approach fits well with the theme of the movie. I wish I could say it has paid off at the box office, but the $11,800 per screen average this weekend doesn't bode too well for word of mouth to take off.

I've always been a fan of using blog software as a full website platform. I'd love to know if this was 100% created by the new media folks at Newmaket, because it could have been, and it would have cost them next to nothing for the blog theme.

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 1:00 PM | Permalink

I've pitched using Twitter for movie campaigns three times now to no avail. Seems the studios aren't ready to embrace it quite yet - or I'm doing a poor job of convincing. Sure, there's little or no statistics on penetration, but the buy-in is cheap, so why not take a chance for at least a nice PR hit?

So far, I've only noticed Fox's Drive premiere utilizing Twitter, but it seems they gave up soon after. Let me know if you know of others!

I guess I need to find me another Zach Braff/Garden State perfect storm again...

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 11:06 PM | Permalink

I've been spending an unhealthy amount of time in Second Life lately as my avatar, Harvey Weinstein. Apparently, so have a good number of brands including the first movie studio with its own island: Fox Atomic.

Right now, I'm just sipping the koolaid. Nursing the drink in case I have to drive to another party should this one be a dud. Dont' get me wrong. I really want to believe. But right now, I'm teleporting to a lot of empty islands, wondering what I'm supposed to do.

The best thing a brand can do after they've spent upwards of $20K to build a monument to themselves is hire someone to at least greet people and answer questions. The new marketing agency, Crayon, does this very well by stationing a receptionist named Britney in the lobby during normal work hours.

The next thing you can do is give visitors a clear reason to be there or something fun/worthwhile to do. Fox Atomic offers free soundstages with several backlot-style sets (western town, city street, etc.) to in-world filmmakers to use (called "machinima"). Nissan gives away free cars from a giant vending machine and while some have scolded them for not being imaginitive enough in their execution, I gotta say, I love my new Sentra and have fun driving it around the Adidas island and seeing if I can drive it inside the American Apparel store for lack of anything better to do on those islands.

CBS has launched a Big Brother island that seems promising and is very popular with residents. So that's encouraging. Steve Rubel has a great round-up of media moves in Second Life.

I'm hoping we're just witnessing the growing pains of what may someday become a really cool dimension to social media and activity on the web.

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 5:03 PM | Permalink

Fox Atomic snuck in a redesign last weekend behind my back! It's a huge improvement in design, function, content and available ad space.

I started this blog last July with a post about their ComicCon-timed launch, so I was excited to see how it is evolving. The goal still seems to be the retention of young, single-film audiences at a destination website offering a content-bridge to hold their interests between releases. I love the idea, but am confused about where all the "community" went between the launch and this redesign. I signed up for the Digital Locker, but only got a "stay-tuned" email. I was hoping this would be the community part, but signing-in gives me no extra benefits (that I can tell).

That said, this is a huge undertaking and I'm confident they're just getting started and more will be revealed soon. The Daily Reports with live correspondents is fun and does a great job of integrating with links to other sites. Snackfootage is a collection of hard-to-watch disaster videos, not to be confused with Stupid Videos which is more Jackass-type fare. The Dave Hill program features a guy interviewing people at ComicCon.

Comics & Games looks like it will be a major element but is all coming soon. Contests seems to be the most interactive with The Nightmare Factory's Submit Your Nightmare, but I'm unable to pull up the Recent Nightmares to read the entries.

Each Fox Atomic film gets its own page with a gallery and links to sites and trailers. I wonder if anyone will be confused by the fact that regular Fox and Searchlight films are featured here. I get it, but will John Q. Teen? Will he care? Prolly not. I'm guessing these pages might be more fleshed out in the future. The film they're pushing the hardest is Turistas and I have to say the MySpace page for that film is one of the best I've seen. Nevermind that it's mostly coming soon, it fits SO well in the awkward MySpace template that you forget it's an MS page. Kudos to the creative team.

Overall, I still applaud the studio's effort to do something smart and value-added for the studio site. I miss the community elements but I'm hopeful they're in the pipeline. The video-masher Blender is still promised, but what of the recent Yahoo! acquisition of Jumpcut, the partner creating Blender? Stay tuned...

Posted by Kirk Skodis at 1:52 PM | Permalink