"Movie Marketing Madness"

I found an awesome blog: "Movie Marketing Madness". The site host, Chris Thilk, has immersed himself in the world of movie marketing - "Movie marketing news, reviews and opinion by Chris Thilk" - and when marketing costs to launch a mainstream Hwood movie are over $50M on average, this aspect of the movie business has become an increasingly important one. So it's great to have a blog like MMM.

And clearly, Chris knows his stuff. He recently posted an excellent analysis of the Twitter-quake that is rattling Hwood studios at present. With Bruno the first reported case of a movie being 'Twitter bombed', contributing significantly to the movie's under-performance at the box office, and District 9 and Inglourious Basterds among the first movie to benefit from being 'Twitter pimped' (my phrase), the studios are likely freaking out. As Chris notes in his analysis, the studios have based much of their roll-out and marketing strategy targeting the first weekend of a movie's release, the thinking being that even with a bad movie, they can cut together a decent trailer, publicize the hell out of it, launch in on a zillion screens, and by Monday AM, have made back most of their investment -- basically before moviegoers had any chance to bad mouth the movie.

But with Twitter, it's instant word-of-mouth. So when Bruno opened strong on its initial Friday night, then got bitch slapped on Saturday and Sunday, you know why the studios are worried: Because the 1st weekend strategy is no longer a sure thing. Hell, with Twitter, even the late night screenings on a movie's first Friday are no longer safe when millions of potential moviegoers are finishing up dessert at their local eatery, only to get tweeted with, "Movie sucks balls! Don't waste your money!"

Here is the summary in Chris' post:

So let’s add all this up and see if it’s at all sustainable:

1. Studios put all their marketing eggs in one weekend-shaped basket, with little support after opening
2. There’s no discernable customer service model in the movie industry, even at the theater level
3. Campaigns are designed to appeal to as many people as possible and shaped to reach as many people as possible
4. The audience has access to a multitude of self-publishing tools to express their every whim, including their opinion of the movie they just saw

Probably not, right?

If smaller movies were being made that appealed to niche audiences and then campaigns were designed to reach those audiences effectively I don’t think we’d be seeing this story emerge. That would decrease the number of people coming out of the theater feeling duped and would actually have the opposite effect of making sure that the word-of mouth that did get spread would be among those communities and therefore have maximum impact.

Again, this is not a Twitter problem. All these “Twitter is destroying Hollywood’s marketing campaigns” stories are, at worst, bunk and at best don’t fully explore the tremendous opportunity Twitter and other status networks present to marketers. But they allow some stakeholders to feel better about themselves, that it’s not their fault for running a deceptive marketing campaign to bring in a big audience that weren’t inclined to like the movie and then bitched about it on a platform that amplified their word of mouth tremendously. It’s not their fault – it’s Twitter.

Your marketing ends where your product begins. It’s not Twitter, word-of-mouth or anything that’s making or breaking your movie: It’s your movie. If you’d like to get better audience reactions, make better product and sell it in a smarter way. That’s a basic marketing axiom that seems be be ignored in all this but probably shouldn’t.

There's a shocking concept, Hollywood: Make a better product!

Movie Marketing Madness is a great site. And check this out: You can download 255 analyses of various movie's marketing campaigns.

What's the value for screenwriting? If you learn how a studio's marketing mentality works, perhaps you can exploit that when drumming up story concepts, brainstorming set pieces, working out plot points, and developing your characters.

In an extremely competitive marketplace, where movies have buckets of competition, everything from social networks to broadcast networks, online games to Twitter, studios will only continue to be more interested in projects they believe will cut through the noise.

And maybe now, with Twitter-bombing and Twitter-pimping, they'll be as resolute in steering good stories through the development and production process.