Part two of our Movie Marketing 3-Way on Across the Sound is up now. But you'd know that because part one prompted you to subscribe to the feed... right?
Joe Jaffe, Chris Thilk and I discuss Red-Band trailers, Balls of Fury and Spiderpig. I rant about John From Cincinnati being canceled. Apparently, I'm the only one in the world who liked it. Good fun.
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.
This past Saturday (a server reconfig screwed my posting ability until now) I participated in a rousing discussion on movie marketing with new marketing guru, Joseph Jaffe and Movie Marketing Madness blogger, Chris Thilk - on Joe's New Marketing Podcast, Across the Sound. These are two guys I respect immensely and consider thought leaders in their respective spaces. We talked for two hours and could've gone longer. The 3-Way is being split into two parts, the first of which is available here and on iTunes.
Coverage of the podcast:
ATS #89
Chris Thilk's MMM
Ian Schafer
Really nice work by Warner Bros., as the first big Comic Con stunt to pierce my consciousness this weekend - the Dark Night Alternate Reality Game and Teaser Sites. Great example of a simple, well crafted and executed offline/online buzz stunt to cut through the clutter of Comic Con.
Good stuff (as usual) from Ian Schafer about a new study on the effectiveness of banner ads.
Someday, I'd love to see a similar study examining the effects of thin-slicing first impressions of movie banner ads. As in: How well (or poorly) does my first exposure (when that first exposure is a banner ad) correlate to me buying a ticket weeks later?
If you follow some of Malcom Gladwell's Blink thesis - I, as a lifelong movie-goer, am an expert on my own tastes, and therefore should, with rapid cognition, be able to know instantly whether a film is something I'll pay money to see. Right?
My good friend Chris Thilk points out how two tent-poles are kicking some serious Internet ass this summer in two important posts today. Read and learn:
Newspapers left out of Sony's Spiderman 3 push.
Ditto.
Get people excited.
Ditto.
Thanks Chris!
Some cool new stuff:
Knocked Up - Nice site with fun features and definitely wins the Loader Screen of the Week Award, hands down. Especially loving the Babymaker feature where you upload your pic and your mates and see what horrible hell-spawn you'll produce. I know what goes into these, and it ain't easy. Great work! Dunno why it only launches from the splash page tho. Looks like they just launched the new Edit Bay feature with a great intro by Judd Apatow. Age gate no workie for me.. I'll try again later.
Really charmed by Eagle vs. Shark too. Mostly coming soon, but it's good to see the evolution of the hub philosophy with links to EVS content on sites like Threadless, Flickr, and Deviant Art. The key art bears a striking resemblance to another cool site...
Year of the Dog is very well put together and designed. Its hard to pull off the hand-drawn look, but I think it's the same guys responsible for Nappy D which makes sense - impeccable work!
What did I miss? Tell me in the comments!
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...
Doesn't the fact that we can't make a move without test screening mean we don't know what the fuck we're doing? I think about this a lot. We all get paid pretty well to wait and see what the 14-year-old mall-rat thinks we should do to sell the movie.
It's one thing I do love about the Internet though; most of the time we're using our gut instincts to tell us what will work with the online audience. I'm sure research will catch up soon enough and make us test every tactic on mall-rats before executing. It's just a matter of time.
Yikes. My two month vacation has got me all prickly and cynical. Good thing no one reads this!
