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MARKETING OVERVIEW
Overview of the Film Industry
Marketing online
The Film Industry has always tried to employ the best and
latest
marketing online which has included multi-media and interactive enabled
websites, advertising through trailer sites, portals, affiliates and
search engines. Directories, opt-Ins, pop-ups, towers or skyscraper
ads, banner Ads, fan sites. You've seen them. Viral, Generational, Demographic,
Psychographic Marketing; you name it, they have done it, been there.
Employing premier marketing packages, using content targeting towards specified generations or demographics, and optimized direct marketing, has been their strategy. With the exception of Independent films, with fewer resources, they have only been limited to the latest technology developments and bandwith.
Advertising
While advertising Films and Film Companies online through their own
sites they MUST ALSO advertise the existence of these films and
sites through through traditional venues such as billboards, in newspapers,
magazines, TV, and of course on other affilaite sites and Search Engines,
etc. We have seen this and they do it superbly. It is diminishing here
but not elsewhere.
For Europe and many smaller countries, its important to note that these traditional avenues of advertising online Films is much more necessary even today as FLAT RATE online access is not available like it is here in the US. Surfing the net can be very expensive in other countries. So, to capture these important Foreign markets, traditional advertising of online film sites is much more necessary.
 Here is a German Billboard advertising the movie HULK and the german website www.hulk.film.de |
Portals
Portals like msn.com, yahoo.com, aol.com and many others have traditionally
been and still are excellent advertising venues for the Film Industry.
Trailers and quick clips, articles and reviews may now be intantly viewed
as soon as your browser opens.
 Welcome to msn.com's portal ad featuring Brad Pitt's 'Troy' Story. Optimized for broadband. |
Affiliates
Film companies join affiliate
programs and become "associates" in exchange for the privilege
of promoting their films, products and services on their web sites,
in their newsletters, etc... using banner ads, text links, letters of
referrals, and much more. This is especially useful for Independent
Films. You may see a link to an independent Film Festival on filmfestivals.com,
for instance.
Search
Engines
The wall
between advertising and editorial is coming down on search engine sites.
Paid listings are showing up in Sponsored Sites in B2B and Shopping
categories on Yahoo!, and LookSmart is piloting a program for advertisers
to sponsor search results. About.com is already using a sponsor model
for its auction site. And Google has been selling relevant text ads
in its search results. But
advertising on search engines is not only on the rise, but is still
one of the premier places to be.
Google revealed its total sales soared a whopping 177% last year to
$961.9 million, from which the company cleared a tidy net profit of
$105.5 million. This year, Google is on target so far for at least another
100% increase. This and other search engine and directories' growth
in revenue and sales from advertising prove that search engine advertising
is a basic online marketing that should be an essential part of the
Film Industry's overall marketing strategy.
Opt-in,Pop-ups
and Banner ads
A smart blend of traditional ads like banners, towers and pops, text
links, editorial coverage are now being combined with interactive promotions
such as contests, sweepstakes, quizzes, surveys, polls, games, across
select sites and emails for instan viral marketing. This delivers a
strong message and creates an effective brand campaign. Many of these
give great ROI, (return on Investment), or bang for your buck.
Distribution
Marketing and distribution of quality streams and downloads can now
be done right inside the media players.
The advancements in Internet digital media distribution have happened
so quickly. The first generation of streaming came online around 1994
with the first upsurge in Internet usage. This experience was audio
only and bad quality audio at that. But the potential was realized by
technology pioneers and teams of developers worked to get higher quality
into the small file sizes needed to be able to transport the data in
a stream in real-time to the user.
The second generation of streaming is what we're familiar with now.
Good audio quality in reasonable file size and acceptable video quality
when played back in a small window. The second generation of digital
media streaming also introduced digital rights management, the ability
to secure content and associate it with licenses that authorized the
playback. This is now an instant and direct promo and play or download
and watch later venue.
More of these latest developments
will be covered in part 2 -