Advertising Marketing PR, Movie Marketing, Online

Animated Movies Ring in the Holidays With Themed Videos

I’m not sure what started this trend, but “holiday video” seems to now be all the rage with the marketing teams behind animated movies. Last year The Peanuts Movie put one out that showed Woodstock and other birds decorating a snow-covered Snoopy as well as his doghouse. Now this year there have been two videos tied to upcoming animated features, one for The Secret Life of Pets and one for Angry Birds.

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What’s behind this trend? It comes down to, I think, the realization by some studios that movie marketing campaigns need to be treated as content marketing efforts. By that I mean, movies now need to compete against other media not just when the movie comes out in theaters but at all stages of the pre-release campaign.

So it’s not just that a two-hour movie is competing for people’s time and money for that movie, but before the movie comes out it’s competing against all the goofy YouTube and Facebook videos that are being produced. So short little themed videos like this are going up against everything else that’s being uploaded both by media companies and individuals.

These kinds of videos are smaller beats compared to full trailers and other news. But they do serve the purpose of keeping the fire of the movie’s campaign stoked among the press and other audiences.

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