Monthly Archives: June 2013

Movie marketing roundup

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A ton of stories have popped in the last couple weeks having to do with movie marketing – including a huge, multi-part feature in Wired – so I’m rounding them all up here. Enjoy this fleeting glimpse into MMM as it still exists.

Trailer Fatigue: Moviegoers Less Thrilled With In-Theater Previews: American movie auds are substantially less likely to watch trailers in theaters than they were two years ago, while trailer viewing online and on mobile devices has jumped over the same time period, a Nielsen National Research Group study found.

Marketers Have Found a Way to Use Vine: Marketers pushing summer blockbusters are aggressively seeding Vine, Twitter’s nascent mobile app for six-second videos, into their social media fieldwork. It’s all about putting butts in seats using Vine’s pithy videos, then selling soda and candy (theater owners’ bread and butter) during the flicks.

The Gripping, Mind-Blowing, Thrilling Evolution of the Movie Trailer: Trailers have changed dramatically over the years, from their one-note origins in old Hollywood to the high-stakes mini-movies they are today. It’s a history defined by the business and artistic transformations in the film industry itself. In the following pages, we explore four eras of the movie trailer, each illustrated with an emblematic example of the period.

Movie Trailers Are Getting Insanely Fast. Trust Us, We Counted the Cuts: Film critics have long lamented the degradation of moviegoers’ attention spans. Movies, they say—and their mini-versions, trailers—have gotten more manic and misdirected in their quest to appease ADD audiences. We wanted to quantify such claims.

Wolverine: Anatomy of a Trailer Campaign: But lately, with the web feeding our content greed, that old formula has splintered six ways to Sunday’s matinee. Now we have teasers for teasers, international trailers, red bands for racier content, parodies on YouTube—it’s endless titillation. And nowhere is that more obvious than summer blockbuster season.

Secrets of a Trailer Guru: How This Guy Gets You to the Movies: Meet Mark Woollen. A video editor since high school—he was already cutting trailers for movies like Schindler’s List in his early twenties—Woollen now runs his own company in Santa Monica, California.

What’s the Best Trailer Ever? Film Maestros Weigh In, and You Can Too: We had to, of course—pick our favorite trailer of all time, that is. It wasn’t an easy decision. Besides the 150-plus trailers we analyzed for this story, we’ve seen thousands in our lifetime. Many stink; some are great.

The Hollywood Reporter Launches Trailer Tracking Feature: The Hollywood Reporter is launching a new feature, The Trailer Report, to keep tabs on who’s watching movie trailers on YouTube with help from Zefr, the leading company offering technology solutions for brand and content management on the platform.

Anchorman 2 trailer

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Nothing immediately jumps out at me as instantly quotable, but the same could probably be said of the original’s trailer. Regardless, I’m there with bells on.

The great “tweet scheduling” boogey man

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I agree with much of the advice that’s given here about Twitter etiquette. Some of it more than others, but this part in particular stuck out at me as being something I disagree with quite strongly:

8. Avoid automation if possible. Scheduling tweets is tricky. It’s not the worst thing in the world, as long as the tweets still sound human and there’s someone to engage with people once the tweets are sent, but something about it just feels icky.

This is part of the same mindset that says all social media comments from customers deserve – nay, necessitate! – a response from the brand they’re directed toward. But that overlooks the reality that neither of these pieces of advice are really achievable at any sort of scale, at least not as part of a core, multi-pronged program.

See corporate publishing programs need to be fed. They need to be fed around the clock. And there’s content – blog post links, photos, videos and more – that needs to be distributed on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere inbetween all those idyllic responses and conversations.

This sort of advice assumes that every program has a 10+ person team that can cover all aspects of publishing, with a full team on duty 24 hours a day to push out links as soon as they pop, instead of being scheduled for an optimal time and in the context of everything else that’s going on.

So I’m sorry if some people think this “feels icky” but tools that allow for scheduled publishing (and the managed ed cals where such publishing is planned) are largely necessary for any program that operates at scale.

(I realize I’m kind of picking on a fairly innocuous comment, but this sort of thinking really raises my hackles.)

Digg updates status on their reader

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And so next week we will begin rolling out Digg Reader, version 1. We’re doing the launch in phases because, as you might have guessed, RSS aggregation is a hard thing to do at scale, and we want to make sure the experience is as fast and reliable as possible. Everyone will have access by June 26th. With all this in mind, we thought now would be a good moment to come up for air and share a little bit about the product you’ll see next week, and what else we’ll be adding over the next few months.

via Digg Blog, Digg Reader Update!.

Digg’s reader is one I’m really excited about kicking the tires on. I’m pretty solidly on board with Feedly right now as my Google Reader replacement but I’m 1) Always looking for a second app to handle other reading and 2) Just super curious about what this team has in mind. I like the redesigned Digg app for mobile reading a lot – it’s a neat, quirky magazine of sorts – and so am looking forward to what this winds up looking and feeling like.

Touchy Feely movie trailer

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This looks interesting and I dig what Shelton is going for here. Though I have to admit the look and feel of Seattle here makes me think this is a pseudo-sequel to Singles.

Music Journal: Alex Bleeker and the Freaks – How Far Away

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Music Journal: The Limousines – Hush

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The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug trailer

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I really enjoyed the first movie – including the bits that were made up for it and did not appear in the source book – and so am greatly looking forward to this second installment, though I am worried this is where the stretching of the material is going to start to become more evident.

Music Journal: Barenaked Ladies – Grinning Streak

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Say what you will about this band, they write a hook like nobody’s business.

“I’ll waive my rights”

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Dave Coustan reminded me today was the anniversary of the Miranda ruling, which immediately made me think of this scene.