To that end, we are fortunate to have an insider's take on the subject. Our expert, who prefers to remain anonymous, has worked in marketing for one of the big movie studios for 7 years, first involved with specialty /indie-films, then moving up to the studio's major motion picture division. I submitted 12 questions to her and got back 12 informative answers. We'll go through them over the course of the next five days. Here are the first two questions and answers:
Q: Please enumerate the various aspects of what a movie studio's marketing department is involved in.And those marketing budgets have skyrocketed over the last decade:
A: A studio’s marketing team is made up of several different departments that each have very specific functions. Publicity teams are responsible for generating and managing publicity for each film, utilizing any of the talent from the film (can be actors, directors, writers, etc). Junkets, premieres, cast appearances on TV and at award shows are all handled by the publicity team at any given studio. Creative teams are responsible for creating TV spots, radio spots, trailers, one sheets, print ads, outdoor campaigns, etc for any given film. Media teams are responsible for all aspects of paid advertising for a film. The media department is given an advertising budget, and has to work within that budget to create an overall media plan. They decide where all of the films advertising dollars are spent, whether it be in broadcast (TV and radio), print (newspaper and general print), outdoor (billboards, bus sides, bus shelters, etc) or online.
The average production budget of a major studio movie reached $70.8 million in 2007. But to sell that movie to the public, studios spent another $35.9 on marketing for a total budget of $106.6 million per picture.This means that when a studio decides to greenlight a movie, they have to anticipate spending on average at least 50% of the cost of producing the movie to market it.
Q: What are the major platforms (e.g., TV, radio, newspaper, online) that studios target when marketing a movie?Note the growing focus on "online advertising." On cue, here is an article the other day from The Wrap: "Friends of Facebook: Studio Marketers". Social networks are ubiquitous, viral - and what's more they're free. Sounds like a marketing department's dream:
A: In my experience, television is where most of a studio’s advertising dollars are spent. Because a television spend (network, cable and local) can be measured in rating points against specific audiences, it remains the most trusted and utilized form of advertising for films. Newspaper advertising has certainly seen a shift in the last several years, as it’s seen as “old” and perhaps a dying media type. Online advertising has definitely seen growth over the years, and I’ve noticed that more and more of a films given advertising budget is shifting towards online media. Radio advertising is rarely used by the studio I work at unless there is a really great creative idea driving it, however I do know that other studios often use radio advertising to promote their films.
The article describes how studios used the Web to promote Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Paranormal Activity, 9, Zombieland, and other recent films.“Couples Retreat” doesn’t hit theaters until Friday, and it hasn’t had any festival exposure to speak of. But the Vince Vaughn comedy already has more than 13,000 “fans” on Facebook grabbing production stills and video clips provided by Universal.
Better still, it’s got the fans taking all that stuff back to their own pages to share with their friends.
With the youthful, moviegoing audience watching less TV than ever, studio marketers have begun to aggressively mine what has quickly become their preferred media platform – the web.
“This is just where the audience is now,” said David Singh, executive VP of creative content for Disney of the use of social networks by studio marketers. “Something like 70-80 percent of frequent movie-goers under 25 visit Facebook eight or nine times a day.”40%! Clearly this 'non-traditional' media is becoming 'traditional.'
Today, pretty much every Disney release has a robust Facebook marketing component, with the studio’s interactive marketing team spending what Singh estimates to be about 40 percent of its time and resources on social media endeavors.
So as we've learned from our anonymous marketing expert, movie studios have these big marketing departments comprised of publicity teams, creative teams, and media teams. The studio gives them a budget per each film and it's up to the marketing department to figure out how and where it will make its best use of those dollars.
Here's the thing: They're not just competing against other movies. They're competing against everything that can grab consumer's attention -- TV, online gaming, Twitter, texting, videogames, etc. And in this day and age where consumers are bombarded by advertisements, one huge challenge in marketing a movie is how to cut through the noise and get a message across to potential moviegoers?
But first, the marketing department needs to figure what 'story' they want to tell about the movie. We'll get into that in tomorrow's post and start to see where decisions by a screenwriter can help a movie's marketing campaign -- or make it a tougher task.
NOTE: Please understand I'm not implying that screenwriters have to think like marketing people. Rather I'm saying we should at least know how they think. What we choose to do with that knowledge is entirely up to us.
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5 comments:
These people would market the holocaust if the bigwigs told them to....wait, they already have on a couple occasions...and those were pretty good movies too!
I was lucky enough to marry a gorgeous woman who majored in marketing and wrote one of the first thesis on undercover marketing. She's now working on a campaign for one of the larger computer brands (god willing the economy doesn't get any worse)
In words I could understand, she explained marketing cost as becoming a problem of decentralization even more so than the number of media outlets. Where there was once a small number of very large billboards one could display an advertisement, the internet has created hundreds, meaning that any money spent on a television spot for the highest rated show on t.v. captures a viewership as small as a fifth of what it would have twenty years ago. (Which is why WWE still generates decent revenue,it's one of the few programs with a very centralized audience of 18-25 males...or was until recently)
The problem could create a new, albeit much smaller, opportunity for writers to squeak in. I think there's a case to be made that film studios, and screenwriters especially, will need to create smaller films which focus on very specific portions of the public, much in the same way that book publishers now operate. If you're a writer who happens to love stories about Japanese tea pots, that kind of film produced on a modest budget doesn't need to suffer these kinds of marketing costs. The internet has done the work of gathering Japanese tea pot enthusiasts into a centralized base camp where they can be advertised to.
Although I'm not so sure the kind of mega-money greed driving the industry would be too thrilled about picking up pennies here and there as opposed to snatching a few hundred million in one weekend. To each his own I guess.
”… we should at least know how they (marketing people) think.”
In my opinion, it is critical that we know how marketing people think, and perhaps be able to think like them when needed.
Just as we keep production costs in the back of our minds, we also need to keep marketing there, too. After all, when we pitch, we’re marketing. The first ten pages are marketing. Getting your script into the right hands is marketing.
Additionally, with more advertising dollars being spent on non-traditional marketing like the internet, it becomes more likely that the screenwriter will eventually find a clause in the contract calling for the creation of ad copy; and why not, we’re already writers, we know the story and we know the internet (for the most part) and like a lot of big corporations, there is a disconnect between the decision makers, marketing and the product support team (screenwriter). The executives will notice little difference between the screenwriter who wrote the script and the copy writer in marketing (many of whom would like to be screenwriters for more than 30 seconds at a time) and so they will assume the jobs are one and the same.
Another aspect of movie marketing I find fascinating is the billboard marketing phenomenon that seems to be found pretty much only in Hollywood. I’ve lived all over the country, visited New York (particularly Manhattan) on numerous occasions and am in Los Angeles every couple of months. And billboard marketing for movies and television seems to be pretty much limited to the greater Hollywood area. It’s surprising how a billboard for a movie can be so different from its one sheet or other advertising. Two that I particularly remember were the multiple different billboards for Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the one creepy billboard in many locations for Disturbia.
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