Movie studio marketing fascinates me as it’s more of an art than a science.  Advertising executives that do most of the media buying to get The Dark Knight in the minds of consumers don’t exactly know how to best spend their advertising dollars.  Additionally, there are cross promotional and licensing agreements that make movie studio marketing quite interesting.  Below is a screen shot from Yahoo! Games:

The image above is a Dark Knight website skin that appears on Yahoo to promote the new Verizon Wireless Dark Knight limited edition cell phone.  So this means that Verizon and the movie studio that produced The Dark Knight made an agreement to license out the Batman brand.  They stuck the Batman brand on this mediocre looking cell phone and struck an advertising deal with Yahoo to sell it.  The Yahoo games section probably gets a few million unique hits a day, but will this result in people rushing out to purchase this cell phone and subscribe with Verizon?  I don’t know - and that’s what makes movie studio marketing so difficult and interesting at the same time.

I recently watched this movie preview that was displayed through Google Adwords/Adsense video units:

I’ve tested this advertising product through Google Adwords before and found it to be less effective than text, image, and flash on the Google Content network. Also, AdSense publishers get screwed because CTR is very low, as most users don’t know they can click the ad. Either way, movie studios use them quite extensively to show previews for upcomming films. However, at the end of the preview viewers don’t know that the advertisement is clickable and can take you to the movies website.

The title of this post is: Movie studio Google Adsense video ads will waste your advertising dollars - this is not necessarily true. It will waste the advertising inventory of any website that allows videos ads to be shown. For movie studios this is great - as they get to show a preview to potential customers for free. As they only pay when the video is clicked, and CTR is so horrible, that its basically free advertising. CTR for these types of ads is going to be extremely low because showing a movie preview pretty much says it all, there is no incentive for the viewer to click through, as they just saw everything they wanted to see. If you are a movie studio and interested in advertising your latest films through this method, please contact Banner Blindness at 843-425-3566 as we have a proprietary software device that can maximize your efforts and get your video seen millions of times - very similar to making your video go viral through YouTube.

Google: you need to install a call to action at the end of the video play if you want people to click.

Furthermore, advertisers: you need to have a call to action at the end of the video that tells users to click on the advertisement to view bonus footage on the website.

The following blog Cinematical had a top 50 list of what was hot in the movies. I read one of the comments on the first page and the writer said, “This was a great post - but why 50 pages? You guys suck at the internet.” I was impressed with this site visitors understanding of online marketing; he hated the fact that they put 1 page of content on 50 pages - the publisher wanted to get 50x as many banner impressions. From a website owner perspective pretty damn smart, but from an advertisers perspective it sucks. It sucks for advertisers because users are experiencing 100% banner blindness in conditions like this. The advertisements being displayed most regularly were:

Cloverfield (a sci-fi shoot’em up) and Tom Cat’s crappy movie about Mad Money - shouldn’t Kramer Sue?  If I have to see another preview with Katie Holmes bouncing to hip-hop in overalls my head may shatter into small Tom Cruise aliens. Could this girl have screwed her career up any worse? Marrying Tom Cruise has gotten her into one of the worst looking movies I have ever seen. Shouldn’t he have been able to hook her up? Especially since he is the number two alien progenerate on the planet known as Earth.  I digress into Hollywood, I’m sorry.  Lets talk about making money through crap like this - because consumers love crap, thats what they are literally full of.

I’m sure movie studios are finding the internet to be the most effective place to do mass marketing in 2008 - as well as ALL businesses both traditional and non-traditional. However, it is a limited audience and television/previews are still the number one advertising methodology.  Movie previews are actually a good example or pre-cursor to re-targeting through display advertising. Let’s take a deeper look at advertising movies across display advertising networks like Specific Media, 24/7 Real Media, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc…

• A movie has a cost per action of an average dollar amount near $14 (that includes movie and food/beverage)
• An average movie has a budget of around 20 million dollars
• Online advertising costs a movie studio $250K on average to run a successful online display advertising campaign. Even more depending on the budget of the film, and how well the production studio believes it will do. Bigger the star, the better the brand, the bigger the budget.
• The ROI for a $250K display advertising purchase is probably around 4x or $1 million dollars. I would have figured it to be much more, but why throw money down the drain if you cant measure it?

Don’t ask me how I came up with these numbers - because they aren’t meant to be accurate, rather; insightful into how major movie studios determine how much to spend in display advertising. However, how the hell can a movie studio determine whether or not a display ad resulted in a movie-goer? Well there are a few different ways:

• Sell tickets online through the ads themselves. However, I get the feeling that only a few hundred tickets a movie are sold this way and have very little overall impact on sales. So this isn’t much help.
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• Have customers fill out a short survey when entering or leaving the movie theatre. This can be either digital (which it should be) or tallied from survey cards and manually entered. This could be a great reporting business for a Nielsen type company to develop. But, this doesn’t exist either.
• Have customers play with a little computer on their armrests and give up customer information (email, address, movie interests, favorite actors/actresses, etc…) Then use this data to do targeted marketing - for example, if someone likes Westerns and a majority of male actors: Then they should have received an email to go to “There Will Be Blood.” Aghhh!  This doesn’t exist either. So how the hell does a movie studio know how much to spend on online display advertising?

They don’t.

I’m sure there are other ways that movie studios and movie theatres could work together to increase visitors and thus sales. The purpose of this post is to inform movie studios of online marketing methods that can result in more visitors to movie theatres, and less in display advertising costs:

Movie Studious: stop paying for display advertising. Run online marketing campaigns that are performance based. Let Tacoda, Blue Lithium, Specific Media, etc… take your business but only on a performance basis. So this might mean the number of tickets sold, number of leads generated (contact information, demographics, and user preference data), click throughs, number of times a preview is watched, etc…. If you continue to run on expensive CPM pricing, you will continue to lose money and be featured on sites that effectively make your ads “Blind” to users because they want to rape you for as much as possible - if you don’t believe me, just look at the site above.

BannerBlindness.com marketing professionals can help your movie studio craft an online marketing campaign that is cost effective, measurable, and profitable! Contact an online marketing professional at Banner Blindness today!