Monthly Archives: May 2005

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – Marketing Recap

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The Poster

How can you not like this poster? It looks so much like a Sears ad that the company signed up for some cross-promotion. Seriously, though, it is a good poster and gets the whole point of the movie being about a close-knit group of girls very well.

The Trailer (Apple, Yahoo!)

Again, this is a better trailer than I really would like to admit. While it starts off very poorly (anything set in a dressing room scares the bejeesus out of me) it quickly rights the ship. There seems to be some genuine emotion in the movie and isn’t just a too-cute flick full of mooning over boys and such. Interestingly, the conceit of the pants is dropped pretty quickly in the trailer and most of it is devoted to actual plot setup.

The Website

The site is very teen-girl friendly and, quite frankly, is a little garish. I’m turned off by the sheer quantity of pastel and other bright colors here but I’m not exactly the target audience. For that group the site is a smashing successs.

There’s an audio welcome message by one of the cast when the Flash site is entered and most of the A/V content is sub-divided by character as well as in the more traditional groupings. Also of note is that this site lets users register for show-time alerts and wallpaper for their cellphones. Since study after study shows that mobile phones are the most important portable device among teens and pre-teens this is a great way to cater to the audience.

There’s a bunch more on the site but these are the real standout portions.

The Future of MMM

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What with my commitments elsewhere taking more and more of my already limited time I have been pondering the fate of Movie Marketing Madness: The Blog quite a bit. Should I let the dust collect until it seeks to be a destination of any sort? Should I say “Fuck it all” and just post whatever I want to post? Should I take a shower to get rid of this smell that’s been with me for five days now?

The answer to all these is “NO!”. So here’s my vision for the future of MMM:

1) The FilmThreat column will continue. There’s no question about that. I love the site, have met some great people and really enjoy writing that column each week (unless life dictates otherwise).

2) The blog will continue but in slightly altered form. Instead of regular updates on site launches, new trailers and such I’m going to segment it more and here’s how. Each day I will write a mini-column on a new movie for that week. The exceptions will be Wednesday and Friday. Wednesdays will be my day off to prepare next week’s FT column and catch up on other stuff.

This may evolve as time goes on but I wanted to solicite thoughts and opinions on this.

Thanks for sticking with me through this transitional period.

The Longest Yard – Marketing Recap

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You can read my full recap of the marketing for The Longest Yard at Film Threat.

Once again, Sandler mugs for the camera and acts like an ass, this time in a remake of the iconic Burt Reynolds film “The Longest Yard.” Apparently studio executives weren’t aware it had already been remade, if in loose fashion as “Necessary Roughness.”

MediaPost comments on shoddy blog data

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The main problem with this commentary by George Simpson is that it relies on the Pew survey showing blogs had no real influence in the 2004 presidential election. The incredibly low number of blogs used in the survey has already been picked apart. In addition to that, some of the “blogs” used in the survey reportedly weren’t blogs, but newspapers and forums.

Simpson needs to be checking a few of the blogs he seems to dismiss off-hand before commenting on such shoddy results. Also, everyone who relies on Pew numbers at this point after their podcast report was torn apart so vehemently needs to recheck their sources. That survey said a third of people who own an MP3 player had listened to podcasts. It was then revealed that when they said “podcast” they also meant streaming audio on the web, which is not the same thing.

Clearing the cobwebs

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Fear not, young ones: I have not forgotten you. Just because I’m doing some other writing away from this blog does not mean I am going to neglect the Movie Marketing Madness site you’ve all come to know and love. I just haven’t figured out quite how this is going to fit in with those other duties as of yet. There are some ideas floating around the transom that is my mind but they haven’t solidified yet.

Don’t go away. I will be back.

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith – Marketing Recap

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You can read my full recap of the marketing campaign for Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of The Sith at Film Threat.

Not a day has gone by since mid-1998 that Lucas and the marketing departments of his myriad organizations that haven’t been focused on the release of this, the final movie in the prequel trilogy. The first two movies (which I have to admit here that I actually like) were the setup for not just the third and final act but also were trial runs for marketing strategies. In fact, it could be argued, that the marketing for the Special Editions was a warm-up lap for the Prequels. Everybody remember how many potato chip bags and such had Star Wars tie-ins in for the SE’s?

 

MarketingSherpa Misses the point on RSS

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First off, let me state I’m a big fan of MarketingSherpa so no offence is intended toward the work they do. That being said, their latest report on RSS is all wrong.

One of the reasons they state for companies not to embrace RSS as a communications tool is it’s lack of market penetration. They state 91% of Americans use email vs. 4% (or so) that use RSS. Fair point. Remember 1991? How many people had even heard of email? I myself didn’t fully embrace email until about 1997 and then only grudgingly. Seemed clunky, I couldn’t make it look like I wanted it to and it was slow. It wasn’t until I started working full time and literally had to communicate via email that I finally got into a groove with it. Like every other communications tool in the history of the world there is an adoption curve to RSS that will have one of two possible outcomes: Mass adoption or abandonment in the face of a better alternative.

They say that a number of those people who do have RSS feeds coming into an aggregator don’t check their feeds daily, whereas email is checked regularly. Fair point. My rebuttal to this is the same as the above point on market penetration.

I’m not going to rebut the entire report point by point. Suffice it to say that I don’t believe it’s immensly important to track the number of subscribers to an RSS feed. Where’s the value in that? What I do think is important is that trackback technology be available on whatever feed is available. That way when a corporate announcement is published the publisher will be able to see, easily and quickly, where that message has been picked up and commented on. That’s the important measurement since that is going to play into brand and reputation management.

Where is Chris?

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If I post here a little more sporadically than before there is a good reason: I’m getting paid to write elsewhere. I am now a contributing writer to three of Weblog Inc’s sites. You’ll find posts by me at AdJab, Cinematical and TVSquad beginning yesterday.

This does not mean I’m abandoning Movie Marketing Madness, either the blog or the column. It’s just going to take a few days for me to get a good groove going on what to post there and here. Oh, and I have my regular day job as well.

Stay tuned and stay with me here. It’ll all get sorted out soon enough.

Newspaper Movie Advertising

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Will Box-Office Blues Put Newspapers in Red? – New York Times

It seems that newspapers may be feeling the same financial pinch from decreased theatrical box-office figures that studios are.

Some interesting numbers in the article:

2004 advertising budgets equaled $3.9 billion.
Web advertising accounts for just 2.2% of ad budgets in 2004.
Newspaper advertising made up 30.7% of the 2004 budget.
Movie ads accounted for 14.2% of national ad revenue in 2004, up from 8.2% in 1995.

So that leaves 67.1 of 2004’s media buys going to a mix of television and, presumably, trailers, and the official websites. But if newspaper readership is going down then how will studios redistribute that money? Or will they continue to hitch their wagons to newspapers, via mutual marketing initiatives with the publications?

We’ll have to wait and see.

Stipp At The Annual Key Art Awards

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Remember how Chris Stipp, when he was here for a while, said he was attending the 34th Annual Key Art Awards? Well his full rundown of the event is up at Le’ Shoot. Check it out.

–Chris