Sunday, February 03, 2013

Savvy Marketing?

It is if it pays off.

While most studios rely on trailers, movie posters, and simple social media tactics to attract audiences to theaters, Pixar has gone one step further.

[For Monsters University], the marketing department has created an entire functioning college website. ...

Sloane Kelley, an integrative strategy director at BFG Communications who has worked with the "Harry Potter" franchise for Warner Bros., says she's never seen an animated film go to such great lengths to promote a feature online.

"This is a really unique approach and they're trying to capitalize on the experience," Kelley tells Business Insider. "They have this issue of getting audiences interested before the launch of a film. They have a real grassroots approach."

"MU" isn't coming out until this summer, but the site has been up since last October. With a longer campaign, the marketing figure is certainly higher than that of a typical movie. ...

What Disney/Pixar is doing for MU makes perfect sense.

It's far from enough to beat the tom-tom inside old media. (You know, broadcast and cable tv? Print media? Movie trailers?) You've got to own internet real estate as well, and not just run-of-the-mill properties on YouTube or proprietary Mouse web sites.

You have to create new, interactive spaces to get the word out. Because no matter how good your product is, it's wise to get ahead of the competition.

1 comments:

Floyd Norman said...

I've often been amused by the extreme measures studios go through to protect the "secrets" about their new movie. Yet, on the other hand they do everything they can to raise awareness of their upcoming epic.

It would appear they want it both ways. I've always found this studio thinking annoying especially since only geeks and fanboys care about this crap anyway.

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