Movie Marketing: Playing to a Packed House
Summer is officially here, and for many people, that means more free time to take in a movie. It also means that studio and media digital marketers need to create smarter campaigns to promote upcoming premieres.
In today’s world, filling seats in movie theaters is anything but simple. More digital channels can translate into more opportunities to engage consumers, but the reality is also that potential audiences are already bombarded with promotional content. In the summer movie season, this only intensifies.
It’s not surprising; a movie’s 36-hour opening singly determines its overall financial success, directly affecting the number of screens it can command as well as subsequent release windows such as video on demand. By the time opening weekend ends, the battle has largely been fought.
Movie promotion is not always easy. It involves many departments with varying goals:
- Getting as many people to view the release at opening weekend.
- Measuring effectiveness of social campaigns, which drive opening weekend audiences
- Correlating social campaigns to gross box office revenues.
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My message to digital movie marketers is this: focus on the top priorities and utilize measurement and data to drive movie marketing decisions. The first place to start is measuring social media.
According to a recent Adobe Digital Index (ADI) analysis, summer movie “social buzz” has been known to accurately predict how well films will perform upon release. (ADI used Adobe Social within Adobe Marketing Cloud to monitor 11.7 million social mentions of blockbuster-style movies over two and a half months, from March 1 to May 17, 2014 ) Using the Adobe Social solution in Adobe Marketing Cloud, ADI predicted which movies would be profitable. The most profitable movies had 2.2x more YouTube trailer views on average than those predicted not to be profitable.
Although social buzz cannot forecast exact gross revenues, marketers can use predictive analytics and social sentiment of previous movies and TV shows in the same genre to infer movie characteristics and market accordingly. BET, Scripps Networks, and CBS Local all use Adobe Social to gauge social buzz and sentiment and drive viewership of their new TV shows.
Another successful tack for movie and TV marketing executives is to use predictive modeling to hone customer segments. Solutions such as Adobe Analytics Premium can help marketers understand what they should be investing in and whom to target. Once customer segments are modeled, movie marketers can use the data and solutions such as Adobe Target to personalize communications and offers in real time.
By harnessing insights from social channels, and combining it with predictive modeling and personalization, studio and TV marketers are successfully answering questions such as
- How do I reach the exact audience with the right message at the right time and price?
- How can I get people who saw a comparable movie or show to watch this one?
- How do I make my media work harder?
- What should my social campaigns do for me?
- Which of my media dollars move the needle on awareness or intent?
Today, with the right solutions and strategies in place, studio executives are finding they can indeed get butts in seats.
For more information about using Adobe Social, Adobe Analytics Premium, and Adobe Target in Media & Entertainment, please visit here.