Powered by Twitter Tools.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Twitter Updates for 2009-06-26 @MackColl
2. Twitter Updates for 2009-07-01 @cc_chapm
3. Twitter Updates for 2009-07-07 Goals, to

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Which leaves influence. New numbers from Nielsen show that 40 percent of iPhone owners have incomes over $100,000 a year. If you match that up with other research that shows those with higher incomes tend to be higher users of social networks in general as well as be viewed as “influencers” among their friends and contacts and a strong case to be made that these movie-based apps are designed to be used and recommended to others. Studios are trying to reach those with disposable income – money that can also be spent on movie tickets – and have identified iPhones as a very specific way to get their time and engagement. It’s more than just following the latest shiny object, it’s about hitting a very specific audience segment.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 5/22/09 Home Video
2. Knowing where your audience is If you hav
3. Finding an Audience: Distribution Notes for 6/12/09 Theatrical

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Weather Girl is the story of a young woman – a weather girl on a local news channel – who one day commits career self-immolation by confronting the anchor she’s been sleeping with with evidence, in the form of a pair of panties, that he’s also been sleeping with his co-anchor. Upon losing her job she realizes she’s kind of aimless in life, with no place to go and no job and nothing else that she kind of needs. So she begins to stay with her brother as she seeks to figure some of that stuff out, an arrangement that brings her into contact with her brother’s roommate and you can probably guess where things go from there.

Despite a completely predictable plot path the movie looks sweet and funny and so let’s check to see how it’s being marketed.

The Posters

Just one poster created here, not that it’s surprising since it’s a smaller movie. It’s mostly an arrangement of stills from the film that show off its characters and situations, ranging from the main character’s co-workers to her girlfriends to her brother and roommate to the two major co-stars that show up briefly, Jane Lynch and Jon Cryer. It’s simple but nice enough. Nothing ground-breaking but it plays up the cast as the obvious strong point. The designers also get credit for not putting the main character in some sort of cliched pose, like standing at a fork in the road or dripping wet under the rain holding a box of her work belongings or anything else. So it works.

The Trailer

The trailer starts off with the event that kicks the story into motion, her rant-filled meltdown on morning television. Then we see her coming to her brother for comfort and how he – and his friend – try to help her get back on her feet. There are a couple of job interviews and an apparent attempt at dating before she finally gets hired as a waitress at a restaurant. Then we see some additional confrontations between her and her ex-beau before the trailer ends with her brother’s friend reassuring her that she’s fine, she’s just a work-in-progress.

It’s a nice trailer that hits a couple nice comedic notes and overall presents a charming and funny movie. Nothing earth-shattering about it but it works for what I think it’s trying to do, which is attract fans of talkative relationship comedies.

Online

The movie’s official website is, just for those of you who might be interested in such things, entirely built on a WordPress blog install. I love pointing these things out because it shows how much that software can do.

The front page has the film’s trailer at the top and a handful of links off to the side that point to the sites for the movie’s production company, film festivals and more.

There are then sections for “Photos,” encompassing both pics from the movie and from its production and “Video,” which is just the trailer.

“Cast & Crew” presents brief background material on those in front of and behind the camera, listing some of their previous experience. “The Story” is a simple one paragraph explanation of the plot.

“Press” contains links to much of the coverage the film has gotten, especially around its appearance at the Slamdance Film Festival this year as well as various interviews and reviews. There are also PDF Press Notes to download for those interested.

“Downloads” is still empty and finally there’s “Contact” with information on how to contact people either for press or sales reasons.

The movie’s Facebook page contains a handful of stills as well as publicity items like cast interviews and information on local screenings. The MySpace page has the trailer, some stills and a handful of blog entries as well as the URL to the main site.

Advertising and Cross-Promotions

Nothing to speak of, at least not that I’ve been able to find.

Media and Publicity

In leiu of paid advertising the film has a surprisingly robust publicity campaign. Mark Harmon and Jon Cryer have plugged the film in addition to their respective TV shows and the rest of the cast appears to be out there a bit as well. The movie has also played at Slamdance and got some decent press out of that and just screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival, resulting in another round of coverage by the trade press and online media.

Overall

A nice little low-key campaign for what appears to be a nice little low-key but funny movie. There’s nothing about it that’s going to give Transformers a run for its money but the team behind the movie executes what it needs to pretty well, especially getting the movie into a couple of festivals, where its target audience is definitely going to be. I like the trailer a lot and the rest of the campaign compliments that nicely.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Movie Marketing Madness: Alexander the Last Let’
2. Movie Marketing Madness: Gigantic Download P
3. Movie Marketing Madness: Rachel Getting Married There

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Powered by Twitter Tools.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Twitter Updates for 2009-05-29 @shel and
2. Twitter Updates for 2009-05-28 Spotted i
3. Twitter Updates for 2009-06-26 @MackColl

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

But that’s about where my agreement with Elowitz ends, unfortunately.

First off, his point about there being little fan interaction with brand presences on those social networks is backwards. It’s not that the thousands of fans aren’t interested in having a conversation with that profile. To a large extent it’s that when they visit that profile there’s no conversation there to begin with and so there’s no incentive to begin one. Conversation begets conversation so a profile that shows no replies to fans, no incentives to participate and no sign of anything other than canned marketing statements is not going to be a social hub.

Secondly, Elowitz’s blanket advice that brands need to start their own communities and not latch on to an existing social network like Facebook is only going to be the right one for a small subset of brands. The internet is littered with corporate-owned communities that cost millions of dollars to launch and then folded due to total lack of interest. Not lack of interest in the brand, just lack of interest in that being the place for people to connect with each other.

For some brands that’s absolutely the best thing to do, assuming they have the research and the goals and the strategy to make ensure it’s going to thrive. For some they should join the conversation on an unofficial fan site. For some they need to monitor the conversation and only pop in with blog comments. For some it’s best – and completely acceptable – to just listen to what’s going on, even if they don’t choose to participate.

But then I go back to agreeing with him when he says, “If you invest in a true relationship with them, you’ll be able to move and react quickly to their ever-changing needs, and even ask them for help.” That’s absolutely true. But a “true relationship” between brands and their fans can happen anywhere – a corporate-run site, a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter – as long as it’s mutually agreed upon and mutually beneficial to both parties.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Fans Friends and Followers As a follo
2. Broadway goes interactive to engage fans There are
3. Marketing Madness in 60 Seconds: 4/3/09 METRICS Ti

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

In the last week or so the issue of sourcing and linking has come to a head to some extent in the movie wing of the blog world. In both cases it’s been in regards to trailers and some sites’ practices of grabbing them from the site that debuted the trailer and embedding it themselves instead of linking to the source site.

This is actually wide-spread in the movie blog world, both in terms of trailers and posters and still photos and just about everything else. If someone gets an exclusive on a new poster they’ll have it all to themselves for about 15 minutes before all the other blogs and news sites grab it and post it themselves. Same goes with everything else. It doesn’t matter what the source is, whether it’s a competing blog, USA Today, Yahoo Movies or anywhere else.

This is the same issue we’re dealing with in the media watching world. When does it cross the line into theft (of content, of traffic) and what counts as fair use? Is it one paragraph that I copy and paste from the Los Angeles Times? Two? Do I get to as far as three if I include a link? Or does anything that isn’t just a link – with no additional commentary or writing – theft in and of itself?

This argument is one of the big reasons I got out of the “daily news” business here on MMM. I was uncomfortable feeling like I needed to make MMM look better by downloading someone’s exclusive poster, even if I linked to them. Grabbing it and posting it myself meant there was little to know reason for my readers to then click through to the source site.

The question is absolutely the same whether we’re talking about another blog or a mainstream news outlet or a portal site. It’s just as wrong to steal a trailer from a competing movie site as it is to download an exclusive photo a newspaper got and republish it. There’s a statute of limitations on this to some extent but that’s measured in weeks and not hours, that’s for sure.

There have been some heated discussions about this and I’m leaving out names on purpose since there’s nothing to be gained by doing so. Like I said, though, I think it’s interesting that this issue, too, is moving from the media world to the movie blogs. Now it would be more interesting to see some standards hashed out amongst the interested parties.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. MTV launches Splash Page comics blog MTV has la
2. The thinking…or lack thereof…behind movie tag lines Not huge o
3. Complete the poster picture Gotta love

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader and can’t view the embedded slideshow you can click here to view it on Slideshare.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Social media marketing in 2009 Stuntdubl
2. Social media investment with C.C. Chapman Social med
3. Doctrinal Social Media Marketing In my chur

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

r8 it is an interactive mobile text/WAP polling program that gives moviegoers a unique way to share their thoughts immediately after enjoying a film in their local theater. Through messaging in on-screen spots in NCM’s FirstLook pre-feature program, Lobby Entertainment Network (LEN) and box office handouts, audiences will be asked to text in the name of the movie they just saw, and will then receive a message back featuring a fun question that asks them to rate a particular element of the film from 1-10.  As an incentive to play, ten r8 it participants will be selected at random over the course of the promotion to win move tickets for a year.

Results of the polls will be showcased online at www.NCM.com/r8it and through the new r8 it app that will be distributed over the NCM Media Network of more than 20 entertainment-related Web sites.

The program hit 70 theaters in top nationwide markets this past weekend and runs through September 10th. You can read more about the campaign at Mediaweek.

I’ve been playing around with thoughts about how, in my mind, studios could begin to leverage cellphones as a way to collect instant feedback on the movies someone has just seen but now it looks like NCM is taking care of just that and you know what? It works. If you visit www.NCM.com/r8it you’ll see that you can share the widget on Facebook and MySpace and post specific feedback to Twitter, with is great since it allows someone’s friends and connections to view their feedback as well.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. National CineMedia relaunches website; Signs Sony Pictures as premiere sponsor In-theater
2. Sprint expands in-theater efforts Cell phone
3. Changing movie poster delivery? In all the

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Now that that’s out of the way let’s talk about the world that author J.C. Hutchins and creator Jordan Weisman have created here and how they’ve extended the story in a ton of interesting ways.

I was one of the lucky handful of folks to get a package containing not only the book but also the following items:

• A letter informing me that since May 1st I’d been a patient of Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital and that all my memories of a “normal life” since that date are a result of my fractured and warped mind.
• An admittance form in my name to Brinkvale, with my history starting out with “Once a keen observer of entertainment industry marketing initiatives and an unabashed movie lover, patent was admitted to Brinkvale after a particularly revelatory analysis of the marketing of several upcoming summer films.”
• An example of the very disturbing art “I” created, along with a note that the artwork was an original one-of-a-kind piece by artist Laura Church.
• A letter with URLs – which I’ll explain later – that point me to other initiatives in the marketing for the book.
• A patient arm-band with my name on it.
• An employee badge for Brinkvale.
• Reproductions of the photos and other documents – a ton of them – that characters in the novel reference. So as you’re reading the novel you can leaf through the stapled packet and see what it is they’re referring to in the story.
• A bottle of my medication (M&Ms).

In addition to what was included in the packet – much of which is apparently included in the front cover of the book when you buy it in stores – there are a number of websites that are mentioned in the book and which lead up to, continue and flesh out the story themselves:

• Brinkvale Psychiatric – The homepage of the institution where main character Zachary Tayler works and where his foil, Martin Grace, is being housed. The site contains the gallery of patient artwork Taylor mentions in the book.
• Back From the Brink – Forums for former patients and loved ones where they can continue to connect with and support each other.
• New York Journal Ledger – The newspaper cited in the book and where Rachel, one of the main characters, does some fact-checking work. Readers of the site can submit their own op-ed pieces.
• You Are Not Meant to Know This – Conspiracy theory site that plays into the story as holding a key clue to the mystery.
• PixelVixen707 – The gaming blog of Rachel, Zach Taylor’s girlfriend and a key component of getting to the bottom of Martin Grace’s life. Really well written for a character blog.

In addition to that, if you search Google for many of the key elements in the story you’ll find references to them that have been planted by the authors. Likewise, if you call the phone numbers included in the book or in the supporting documents you’ll hear voicemails from the characters.

So now let’s look at the more traditional – and even then I’m stretching the term “traditional” marketing elements that are listed on the book’s official website:

• Hutchins has created “Personal Effects: Sword of Blood,” a podcast audio book that tells a story of Zach Taylor and one of his patients that occurs before the events of Dark Arts.
• There are a series of “Vlurb” trailers featuring endorsements of the book by some key figures in the ARG and horror genres. They’re basically audio/video versions of the kinds of blurbs you’d find on the back cover of a book.
• You can fill out a form to Commit Yourself to the Brink and get your own customized packet of admission forms in the mail.
• Phase Two gives you all the material and guidance you’ll need to not only spread the word about the book yourself – there are prompts here to invite Hutchins on your podcast, print out a Dark Arts bookmark, email information to your friends and a ton of other points – but to make sure that the bookstore near you is carrying the book.
• A series of Avatars you can download and then use on your IM software, Twitter profile or anywhere else you’d usually do something like that.

Phew.

In short Hutchins and Weisman have take a single story and provided the additional materials necessary to let the reader fully interact and explore the world it takes place in.

Now while some of the tactics employed for Dark Arts aren’t completely applicable to the world of movie marketing many are. Character blogs that are referenced within the movie, podcast supporting material, the creation of documents that are related to what’s happening in the movie – all of these are doable and they’re doable at whatever scale will work for a filmmaker’s budget.

Also applicable to filmmakers is the array of material that’s available that allows people to express their enthusiasm for the property. The Phase Two section of the Dark Arts site is a case study in and of itself in what sorts of resources independent filmmakers that rely on word of mouth need to be adopting in order to let people do the marketing for them.

Some of my friends in the social media world got similar packages and I’d encourage you to read their posts as they approach the Dark Arts story and marketing from different angles. Greg Verdino, C.C. Chapman and others received them and have provided their own take on it.

But let’s cut to the chase at the end here: None of this would be even the least bit interesting if the story weren’t good. Like the ARG campaigns for Cloverfield and The Dark Knight, the payoff in the form of the main attraction needs to be worth the work the audience has put in. In this case it’s a little different as it is, ideally, work that’s being done simultaneously with reading the finished product, but the same principle applies.

A big thanks (and a helping of full disclosure) to Hutchins for sending me this review copy of his book as well as all the fantastic material that’s been created in support of it.

Did you like this post?

Related posts:

1. Book Review: Marketing to Moviegoers 2nd Edition About a ye
2. Book Review: Fans Friends and Followers As a follo
3. Review Round-Up: 1/23/09 It’s

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.