The third annual Variety Film Marketing Summit covered a range of topics from movie-going opportunities in BRIC countries to social marketing and the current state of film distribution and marketing. On the list of conferences and seminars, this one would have to be near the top due to the quality of speakers and moderators.
The first discussion of the day was perhaps the most intriguing, “Opportunities in Emerging Markets.” With representatives from Fox International Marketing and RealD the focus was mainly on China, the second biggest film market in the world.
China is the wild west of film. Numerous inconveniences stand in the way of American studios but it is too large of a market to ignore. Studios rely on the China Film Group’s revenue numbers to collect their percentage of the share, and even then it takes a long period of time to receive the money. The China Film Group also restricts foreign films to 40% of the market and has a large influence over release dates, often not giving the studio advance notice of the final release date. At this point it becomes a mad dash to get the marketing in order.
Films are marketed in China largely via TV, outdoor and digital media. The largest social network in China, Renren, is used regularly and social media had a large impact on Titanic recording $145MM in revenue. Director driven publicity goes a long way in China. James Cameron made an appearance at the Beijing Film Festival to coincide with the Titanic rerelease.
3D Films are very popular in China, accounting for about 40% of the box office. 3D is a way of piracy protection because consumers know they can’t replicate the same experience at home with their bootlegged version.
Another interesting topic covered the marketing for the film Ted. While I rated it the worst film of 2012, I would consider it the best-marketed film of 2012. Universal Pictures had a great understanding of the film and its target market. They knew the crude humor would be difficult with the MPAA restrictions so they enlisted the help of the filmmakers who were already hugely popular to push the film.
Seth McFarlane and his writers had 3.5 million Twitter followers and Family Guy had 40 million fans on Facebook allowing Universal to leverage the filmmakers’ current fan base and create one of the most viral campaigns in history. Like in the movie the marketing team gave Ted, a talking teddy bear, a real personality in the digital world. By the time the film came out Ted had sent out 300 tweets and had hundreds of thousands of followers anxious to see the film.
There were also over 10 million downloads of a photobombing app called “My Wild Night With Ted,” a brilliant complement targeted at the under 35 crowd that is most likely to go see the movie. The campaign continued to the home entertainment release and beyond, and now that a sequel has been green lit the studio has an established fanbase already in place.
Ted’s marketing success is another example of how knowing your product and knowing your market are the most important things in marketing.
Month: October 2012
Cloud Atlas
Cloud Atlas explores the actions and consequence of five separate but loosely connected narratives that, when woven together from past to present, affect the outcome of a sixth on a future post-apocalyptic island. From a nineteenth-century clerk to an aspiring composer to an investigative journalist to a best selling publisher to a clone created for slave labor back to the island, the story follows a single act of kindness that ripples through time to inspire a revolution. No dialogue summarizes this better than when a character is told that his life amounts to “no more than one drop in a limitless ocean,” he asks, “Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
Roger Ebert describes Cloud Atlas as “one of the most ambitious films ever made. You will want to see this daring and visionary film. Anywhere you go where movie people gather, it will be discussed.” HSX predicts that the movie will open at $19M this weekend.
Check out the official Cloud Atlas page to see the extended first look, director’s commentary, photo galleries and other miscellaneous media.
Rating: R // Genre: Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi // Runtime: 2 hr. 52 min. // Starring: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, James D’Arcy, Xun Zhou, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon and Hugh Grant // Based on the Novel by: David Mitchell Wriiten for the Screen and Directed by: Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski, // Produced by: Cloud Atlas Productions / X-Filme Creative Pool, Anarchos Pictures, A Company and ARD Degeto // Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Digital Ad Growth
In the first half of 2012, digital ad revenue climbed to an all-time high of $17B with Q1 accounting for approximately $8.3B and Q2 $8.7B. Combined, this represents a 14% increase, compared to the first two quarters of 2011, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The not-so-great-part is that half-year growth has declined from 23% between 2010 to 2011 to 14% between 2011 and 2012, indicating that digital ad spend may finally be slowing down. Chief research officer at Kantar Media North America Jon Swallen writes, “Ad spending growth sputtered during the second quarter and was unable to sustain its early year momentum,” and that, “The advertising market is mirroring the tepid, slow growth performance of the general economy.” Despite this, online advertising continues to show strong growth in certain segments.
Other highlights from the report include:
- Mobile advertising increased 95% in the first six months of 2012 going from $636M (2011’s half year amount) to $1.2B. Mobile represents about 7% of online ad spend, which is still relatively small.
- Display-related advertising (e.g., display/banner ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship) revenues in the first half of the year totaled almost $5.6B, accounting for 33% of 2012 half-year revenues, up 4% from $5.3B in the first half of 2011.
- Ad spending increased on TV 4.4% in Q2 of 2012, 2.5% for outdoor media and 1.9% for radio, according to Kantar.
- Display ads for online publications, were less successful than all of the above. Advertising revenue declined 1.9% for local newspapers, 2.6% for consumer magazines, 5.4% for display ads online and a whopping 10.7% for national newspapers.
- Despite an overall decline of about 4%, retail advertisers constitute the largest category of Internet ad spending for the first half of this year, claiming 20% total revenue at $3.4B.
- Consistent year-over-year, performance-based pricing (CPC) remains the preferred model over impression (CPM) and hybrid models.
David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, writes, “The tremendous growth of mobile advertising revenue over the past year is an indication of the importance of location to advertisers and mobility to consumers. Bringing the power of the Internet to mobile devices has opened up a world of possibilities to both consumers and marketers.” But while the IAB and others continue to tout digital ad growth by citing its progress relative to other mediums, the majority of ad dollars are still spent offline. In 2011, newspapers and magazines yielded $35.8B in offline ad revenue. Whether or not online ad spend exceeds print media by the end of this year is anyone’s guess, but it almost certainly will at some point in the next few years. In any case, it’ll definitely take a lot longer for it to surpass TV as it accrued nearly $75B in ad dollars in 2011.
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Photo Credits: Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Womensmarketing.com
Fearless Felix and the Supersonic Freefall
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first man to break the sound barrier flying an experimental Bell X-1 at Mach 1. And as jets continued to fly higher and faster, the United States Air Force (USAF) became increasingly worried about the safety of flight crews who had to eject at high altitude. Its tests in Operation High Dive, using dummies and not actual airmen, showed that free-fall at high altitudes usually resulted in flat spins at a rate of up to 200 revolutions per minute, which were potentially fatal. So to solve this, the USAF initiated Project Excelsior to design a parachute system that would allow for safe, controlled descent from high altitudes. A technician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, by the name of Francis Beaupre, devised a multistage parachute system that consisted of a drogue parachute that served to stabilize and mitigate uncontrolled spinning or tumbling and a main chute that would be deployed at a lower, more optimal altitude.
If you watched the Red Bull Stratos jump yesterday, you saw Excelsior’s test pilot in the mission control booth, Joseph Kittinger. Back in 1960, he set records for highest parachute jump, longest drogue fall and fastest speed by a human through the atmosphere, jumping from a gondola at nearly 103,000 feet above the Earth. He served as Felix Baumgartner’s mentor throughout the Stratos project and, yesterday, as “Capcom” (Capsule Communications), Kittinger was his primary point of radio contact from start to finish.
For those of you who missed yesterday’s jump, Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver, rocketed head first from 128,000 feet up for more than four minutes hitting 833.9 MPH— or Mach 1.24 — before deploying his parachute and became the first human to break the sound barrier without vehicular assistance exactly 65 years after Yeager made history to the day, and it was nothing short of incredible. According to a Q&A on The Guardian: Prior to the jump, his team of aeronautics, medical and engineering experts “identified 16 key risks, including: ultraviolet radiation; wind shear; landing impact; extreme temperatures; hypoxia, oxygen starvation; decompression sickness; entering a flat spin during the descent; ‘shock-shock interaction,’ an explosive effect when shock waves in the air collide when passing through the sound barrier; fire aboard the capsule” as well as a “‘breach’ in the suit or capsule and, finally, the accidental deployment of a parachute, that had to be overcome for the record attempt to succeed.” Here, the phrase “for the record attempt to succeed” can be used interchangeably with “for Baumgartner not die.” Knowing this full well, Baumgartner, like Yeager and Kittinger before him, committed to something bigger than himself and pushed the envelope to provide valuable medical and scientific insight for future pioneers despite the immense risks.
And while I do think that the jump may have been the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen, I couldn’t help but wonder what Red Bull stands to gain from sponsoring this project outside of confirming its slogan. That’s until I looked at the numbers and realized that the live stream shattered more than free fall records. By attracting eight million concurrent viewers, the mission proved to be YouTube’s most highly watched live stream. It was broadcasted on more than 40 television networks in 50 different countries, and it drew over 2.6 million social media mentions throughout the course of the day according to an article on Radian6 by Jason Boies.
Ben Sturner, President and CEO of Leverage Agency, a full-service sports, entertainment and media marketing company, says, “The sponsorship transcended sports and entertainment into Pop Culture, hitting new consumers that Red Bull does not usually capture and on a global scale. The value for Red Bull is in the tens of millions of dollars of global exposure, and Red Bull Stratos will continue to be talked about and passed along socially for a very long time.”
At the end of the day, what’s your brand investing in?
Photo Credits: RedBullStratos.com, RedBullUSA.com, Jason Boies
Argo and Here Comes the Boom
In 1979, when the Iranian revolution reaches a boiling point, Islamic militants led by the Ayatollah storm the US embassy in Tehran taking 52 Americans hostages. Unbeknownst to the Iranians, six are able to escape and take shelter at the Canadian ambassador’s home. The Central Intelligence Agency decides that they can’t stay there because if they are found, they along with the ambassador will be publicly executed in the streets. With the CIA at a loss to figure out how to smuggle the hostages safely out of Iran, exfiltration specialist, Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck), hatches a plan to extract them under the guise that they are a Canadian film crew scouting out locations for a made up science-fiction movie, set in space, called Argo. Where, after having established their covers, they’ll then be able to walk right past the Revolutionary Guard using their new fake identities with no one the wiser. As Mendez’s boss, Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) puts it, “This is the best bad idea we have.”
Rex Reed of The New York Observer writes, “Gifted, intelligent and full of cogent ideas, Mr. Affleck can almost always be depended on to come up with something fascinating, coherent and thoroughly cinematic. Argo, his third feature film as a director after Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Town (2010), is no exception. It grabbed me by the lapels and held my attention for two solid hours without a sideward glance, and I can’t wait to see it again.” HSX predicts that Argo will open at $18.8M. From the raving reviews we’ve seen thus far, we think the film will crush those expectations.
To see if you have what it takes to be part of a major CIA operation, click here.
Rating: R // Genre: Drama, Thriller // Runtime: 2 hr. 0 min. // Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman // Directed by: Ben Affleck // Written by: Chris Terrio, Joshuah Bearman // Produced by: GK Films, Smoke House, Warner Bros. Pictures // Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
In Here Comes the Boom, Scott Voss (Kevin James) is a 40-something burned out high school biology teacher about a decade past his “teacher of the year prime” who is stirred to action when one of his colleagues (Henry Winkler), a teacher who is still inspiring children well into his career, faces the chopping block due to cutbacks in extracurricular activities at his school. In an effort to raise money, Voss picks up a side job moonlighting as a competitive mixed martial arts fighter. Lucky for him, and the school, Voss was formerly a collegiate wrestler. But despite the fact that he’s pretty well over the hump, and everyone thinks he’s crazy, Voss becomes a sensation when he rallies the entire school.
Roger Moore writes, “Kid-friendly funnyman Kevin James is at his cuddliest in Here Comes the Boom. He’s developed a comfortable screen presence that takes away the impression that he was working too hard for laughs. James, [Henry] Winkler, [Salma] Hayek and [Bas] Rutten make an amusing ensemble and click together.” HSX is predicting that this film opens at around $15M.
Rating: PG // Genre: Action, Comedy // Runtime: 1 hr. 45 min. // Starring: Kevin James, Salma Hayek and Henry Winkler // Directed by: Frank Coraci // Written by: Kevin James, Allan Loeb, Rock Reuben // Produced by: Broken Road Productions, Columbia Pictures, Happy Madison Productions, Hey Eddie, Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) // Distributed by: Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures
Curating and Sharing Content for Beginners
Mush. That’s what my brain feels like after curating our Twitter and Facebook feeds, digging through Inbound.org, Hacker Network and a dozen other news sources for high-quality content on search engine optimization (SEO), advertising, graphic design and web development to share throughout the day. All of which is made significantly more difficult due to the fact that there’s so much information to sort through online, plenty of which is deficient in some way or another. According to MBAonline.com, every 24 hours, two million blog posts are written, and 864,000 hours worth of video are added to YouTube. All in all, about 168 million DVDs worth of information is consumed by Internet traffic every single day. As Mitchel Kapor, an entrepreneur and software developer, says: getting information off the Internet is like drinking via fire hydrant.
So why do we do it?
At the end of last year when I was going through the interview process here at Bravo Design, part of what was discussed was how the company could foster and grow its online presence. And since then, we’ve seen some real progress in terms of our web traffic, due to our improved search engine ranking, and in the increase in our social media fan base. Not everything has gone as planned, and progress has sputtered from time to time, but we’ve stayed steadfast in our commitment to write about current events and trends in the industry to position ourselves, so we can serve as a resource for both our visitors and our clients even if it’s just a random something to make them smile. With so much great information online, often in obscure places, it’s been a priority of ours to put our readers in touch with content and tools that have the potential to make their lives easier and/or run their businesses more efficiently. Up through now, it’s been a great learning experience. That being said, I really want to encourage you to start curating great content and sharing it with your friends and followers. If you want to read more on the subject before making the leap of faith, Michael Fern from Intigi has a great write up on the topic.
Listed below are a few considerations that will help you get started.
1. Determine what you want from this exercise by setting goals on the front end. Are you looking to monetize your site by driving sales or with ads and need to increase traffic and return visits? Are you looking to increase your readership? The sooner you know, the better prepared you’ll be to set milestones to gauge success along the way.
2. Know your audience, so you can share content they find useful or interesting. This means getting comfortable reading through your website’s analytics and tracking hits, click-through-rate, interaction and propagation. If you’re two steps ahead on that front, here’s an article on actionable and vanity metrics and measuring what matters.
3. The audience you’re reaching out to is likely widely disparate, so you might have to use different forms of media like podcasts, videos, white papers, infographics and so on to increase your brand’s exposure. That also means using different channels/platforms like social media, mobile as well as content curation and industry communities.
4. Each piece of content you share should serve as a stepping-stone that guides your audience from one interaction to the next. Of these considerations listed, adhering to this might be the most difficult. Just tacking on a URL isn’t good enough, and neither is simply adding contact information.
Curating and sharing content, like some of the other exercises we’ve detailed in the past, takes both time and patience. You might not get much feedback early on, but interaction with your audience will ramp up if you’re engaging and sharing solid pieces of content. If you’re not following us on Twitter or Facebook, you’re missing out. When you do, shoot us a message or leave a comment in the field below, so we can reciprocate the favor in kind.
Photo Credit: Mike Segar (Reuters) and Iloveseo.net
Taken 2
Set two years after Taken, Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) gets a surprise visit from his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), and his ex-wife, Lenore (Famke Janssen), while on a business trip in Istanbul, but the reunion quickly turns sour when Lenore is taken hostage by Murad Hoxha (Rade Šerbedžija), the father of a man Mills killed in Paris. With Lenore held hostage and Kim on the run, it’s up to Mills to rescue his family by any means necessary.
Bernard Besserglik of The Hollywood Reporter calls the film, “a high-octane mixture of violence and pursuit. The filmmakers know precisely what they are doing, and Taken 2 is in some ways a more polished product than its predecessor, taking full advantage of its exotic locations and pacing its action sequences more successfully.” HSX predicts that the film will open at just over $31M between its 3,000 locations.
As a bonus perk, if you navigate to the film’s Facebook page, you can test your skills to see if you have what it takes to survive being taken or play with the Bryan Mills meme generator.
Rating: PG-13 // Genre: Action, Crime, Drama // Runtime: 1 hr. 31 min. // Starring: Liam Neeson, Famke Janssen, Maggie Grace and Rade Serbedzija // Directed by: Olivier Megaton // Written by: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen // Produced by: EuropaCorp, Grive Productions, Canal+, M6, Ciné+ // Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation