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'Friends' of Facebook: Studio Marketers
“This is a huge part of our marketing now -- and a lot of what we’re able to do is free.”
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“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.
These days pretty much every major release now has promotional ties to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or the other online watering holes where movie-watchers congregate. (The marketers' preferred social network? Find out here.)
“This is a huge part of our marketing now … creating an account and building a fan base -- and a lot of what we’re able to do is free,” said Nicole Butte, VP of new media for Focus Features, who recently oversaw a social networking campaign for the Tim Burton-produced animated film “9.”
Huge is right.
Paramount's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" Facebook page has more than 1 million fans, who will receive notifications of the title's Oct. 20 DVD and Blu-ray release.
Last weekend's box-office champ, "Zombieland," has more than 250,000 fans -- 10,000 of which have signed up to play a Java-based game that lets them "kill zombies all over the Internet" with objects including banjos. As with most movie game apps, those who sign up to play not only agree to share profile data, they also post a promotion for th
e film on their own Facebook wall every time they visit a Sony-sponsored site that supports the online game.
Meanwhile, for its micro-budgeted horror film "Paranormal Activity," Paramount hired San Diego-based boutique marketing firm Eventful to, among other things, create a social media campaign built around driving users to the film's site so that they can "demand" that the movie open wide. As of Thursday, "Paranormal" was one of Twitter's top 10 "trending topics."
As for “9,” an aggressive Facebook campaign allowed the studio to frame the movie’s mysterious subject matter and characters for a core group of film enthusiasts. Even better, the smaller group virally disseminated the information they’d gathered to a broader audience – long before expensive TV ads began to run.
Indeed, the intersection between social media and the movie business became apparent this summer, when Universal’s “Bruno” got off to a hot Friday-night start. Unfortunately, that film also highlighted the downside of the new alliance when it cratered precipitously the following day and never recovered -- the victim of same unfavorable, real-time tweeting.
Studio marketers at the time gave birth to a new phrase, the “Twitter Effect,” to explain how dissatisfied moviegoers armed with smart phones and social networks were torpedoing films even before they left the theater.
According to information released last week by former New Line interactive marketing guru Gordon Paddison, who is now an industry consultant, 73 percent of 4,000 moviegoers in a recent study have established profiles on social media networks.
