Marketing Hollywood: Cross-Platform Branding

At a Digital Hollywood panel on “Marketing Hollywood: Movies, Broadband, TV, Games, Music – Cross Platform Branding, Live Events & Enhanced Media,” moderated by New Medici co-founder/CEO Adrian Sexton, discussed social media, online and mobile branding and marketing digho1 strategies for Hollywood.

“Hollywood is looking for new kinds of marketing to recapture parts of the audience lost to social media,” said Sexton, who admitted he “escaped the studios” to start his own company. He also highly recommended a book—The Curse of the Media Mogul–that was just released this week.

Panelists included Lisa Marino, CMO at RockYou, which she described as the “largest provider of games and applications on the social media platform; Jason Peterson, president of GoDigital Media Group; Geoff Cook CEO of MyYearbook, a popular teen gathering site; and Craig Bland, VP of celebrity programming and development at BUZZMEDIA, a venture-backed with verticals on music and celebrity.

Sexton started off the conversation by asking: Reach, frequency, engagement–what matters the most? Bland answered that “it comes down to the ability to program.” “If you can program effectively and get your audience engaged in programming, to take that and apply it to sales is the golden win,” he said. “If it’s done right, audiences will be the greatest advocates.”

Cook noted that his company focuses on “best-of-breed” apps. “When an advertiser comes to Yearbook, they look for engagement,” he said. “They’re also looking for reach among teens. I definitely don’t think you can separate reach and engagement. End of the day, what we deliver is engagement. A trailer view is worth something. There might not be much value in being a fan. Does seeing the trailer and expressing intent in seeing it convert to ticket sales? The studios have sophisticated models on how viewing the trailer will impact your likelihood of seeing the film. Can I specifically point to numbers? No.”

“Proving purchase intent is one of the hardest things to prove,” agreed Peterson. “What really creates purchase intent? We get some 3,000 messages a day. How do you cut through the clutter and present a message that’s relevant to a sub-set of consumers? It’s of paramount importance for studios to start thinking of their properties as brands relevant to a certain consumer audience. They need to make that brand live. They can’t resurrect it ten years down the road when they’ve done nothing to create a brand.”

Sexton agreed, pointing out that you “you don’t resurrect the brand, keep it on life support.” He noted that studios have the mindset of getting people to the film. “When the film does well, why isn’t there an add-on conversation,” he asked. “They expand theaters and ads, but not brands.” Peterson believes that producers dilute their brands, pointing to Legendary Pictures which has a history of making big action-driven titles based on comic book figures. “They have almost zero consumer community audience they can reach because they’ve never considered themselves a brand,” he said. “There’s nothing easier than re-marketing to a group of people in your database.” Marino agreed, pointing out that Marvel Comics and Disney have both done that well. She also brought up the Twilight franchise. “The have done a wonderful job extending their brand as a series in between movies,” she said. “But very few blockbusters have done it.”

Peterson brought up the fact that the talent in these films need to build their own communities, referring to the film New York I Love You. “It has an Oceans 11 type of cast,” he said. “But none of them have any communities they can reach out to.”

Bland said that he’s found a lot of hesitancy among studios and celebrities in having a social media presence. “There is a way of thinking that is so entrenched in Hollywood that these brands need to be protected,” he said.

That, of course, brought up the topic of Ashton Kutcher who has done a great job at using social media to activate his fans and drive his brand. Even so, pointed out Sexton, Kutcher’s recent TV show, The Beautiful Life, on CW was canceled almost immediately.

Mobile is the most cost effective way to drive engagement with the fan database, said Peterson, who pointed to Mozes as “making a great mobile platform with social engagement.” “You can mobilize this community at zero cost,” he said.

But does that translate into merchandising sales and other demonstrable ROI? Sexton noted that Twilight has succeeded at this. “They do a traveling show with talent and filmmakers,” he said.

Not every film can build a community, everyone agreed, but there are ways around this. “You can’t build a community around Juno, but you can build a successful community around Ellen Page,” noted Marino.

An audience member noted that the reason social media works in music and not in movies is ecause music talent tours and does merchandising. “Why would I build up talent if I were a studio?” was the question. “The dynamics of the film studio means that the social media for talent will never work.” Peterson agreed that “talent should build their own social media, as an investment in their careers.”

Cook reported a successful example. “We created a branded widget for Harry Potter where the user could cast a spell on another friend. The spell effect would take place on their profile. That’s an example of a branded widget with an entertainment quality.”

“Contextual advertising is an old idea that’s new again,” said Bland, who pointed to boxing matches with Gillette, or GE appliances in the 1950s. “The idea is how to understand the objective with the advertising brand, understand its essence and create programming that addresses that in interesting ways.” He described a campaign they did with Sony and The Ugly Truth. “We took one of our celebrities and one of our bloggers and had them do a debate on male/female topics,” he said. “That created tremendous engagement. It was a fun, engaging and successful campaign. It was intuitive and made a lot of sense.”

Peterson noted that the audience has become more dispersed as everything becomes available on demand. “You need to find new business models,” he said. “In a union town where the cost of labor won’t go down, you need to get advertisers involved up front–and you can guarantee them they’ll get a certain amount of engagement and views.”

Digital marketing and online marketing can’t successfully exist by itself, said the panelists: there has to be offline components with TV, print and other components that help digital be successful. “In the movie space, it’s hard to open a movie with just Internet marketing,” said Peterson.

Audience members who queried how best to market their indie films (or other entertainment products) cost effectively, were encouraged to put an agency on their team to “find out where all the fish are.”

Where should people go next in social media? Peterson declared himself “a big fan of the mobile device and anything that sits on the mobile device.” ” It’s not just a marketing tool but a monetization tool,” he said. “Some cable networks have built their entire business models based on engagement over the mobile device. Everyone in this room has a phone in his pocket.”

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