E Content Magazine analyzes how far Hollwyood has come (or dragged their feet) since the heady days of “Blair Witch project.” Two opportunities exist: marketing to net-savvy youth audiences and distribution. Our answer: dinosaurs dancing.
by Richard Hull | Oct ‘04
In the mid 1990’s, the buzzword in Hollywood was “convergence.” Everyone in Tinseltown sought desperately to solve the riddle of how Hollywood’s content would merge with emerging digital technologies. The bigwigs at Microsoft made a bold march onto studio lots and proclaimed that they held the keys to the convergence kingdom. Yet in a short time, the two sides called a truce and returned to their respective corners, declaring that Hollywood would stick to content, while Microsoft would stick to technology.
Ten years have passed and, after getting its proverbial bubble burst, Hollywood has timidly started to embrace the online world once again. Will it be for real this time? And if so, how is Hollywood seeking to get the most bang for its online content buck?
Success and Failure
Ask anyone in the movie business about Hollywood’s most high-profile online success and he or she will tell you about The Blair Witch Project when the stars truly aligned. “We caught lightning in a bottle,” says Kevin J. Foxe, the film’s executive producer. “The online community took the film’s marketing materials and passed them around virally in such a way that audiences showed up in droves for opening night.” Clearly, without the online buzz, it is a film that would have never been discovered by mainstream audiences. Instead, the movie—made on a $35,000 budget—went on to gross more $350 million worldwide.
Of course, this well-worn success story took place five years ago. Common sense would dictate that this should have been the first splash of an inevitable tidal wave that blended Hollywood’s content and the Internet. Instead, the well quickly ran dry. And in Hollywood’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately culture, hanging your hat on a success five years in the past doesn’t get you invited to too many lunches.
Now for the first time in years, Hollywood’s online ad spending is up, and the backrooms of Sunset Boulevard eateries are once again abuzz with producers talking about the Internet. According to figures from the Motion Picture Association of America, online advertising budgets for its member studios nearly doubled from 2002 to 2003. “And the news for 2004 is even better,” according to Ian Schafer, president of Deep Focus, a leading online marketer of studio movies for clients such as MGM, Miramax, and Dreamworks. “We’re seeing at least five percent of overall marketing budgets for a film being allocated for online promotion, and this is up considerably even since the beginning of this year.” While these numbers can’t compete with budgets for television and print, they do indicate a steady improvement in Hollywood’s attention to online audiences.
So why has Hollywood only just recently returned its attentions to the online world? In order to understand the answer, it’s important to realize that, for Hollywood content-makers, the Internet boils down to only two things—marketing and distribution. And each represents a double-edged sword.
The upside in the marketing arena is that the Internet has joined the ranks of bona fide mediums that can be used to galvanize the audiences who fill theaters on opening nights; the downside is that, if not done properly, it can severely damage or even destroy hard-won brands. For distribution, the coming years might very well prove the Internet to be an additional and enormous revenue stream, while the downside entails the hot-button issue of content piracy.
Marketing
Only in the past few years have Hollywood new media staffs migrated from beneath the umbrellas of the IT departments to those of marketing. And Hollywood marketing these days is all about opening weekend box office. “The biggest challenge in online movie marketing right now is to make sure that showtimes, theaters, and viewable trailers are accessible to a user at all the right times,” says Deep Focus’ Schafer. People still need to constantly be reminded that they need to get out of their seats and go to the theater.
And while they’re surely limited by budget, online marketers are also constrained by limited available content and how they can access it. Many outsourced online marketers complain of having to sift through shipments of unlabeled CD’s containing non-catalogued cast photographs and movie graphics. The new rules are clearly being written as we speak.
“Rather than being an end-all, be-all…the Internet has become simply a piece of the marketing pie,” says Hollywood movie producer Andrew Panay. “Just as with movie marketing in general, we’ve learned that some audiences respond to online marketing, and some don’t.” For instance, Panay is currently finishing the Miramax film Underclassman starring Nick Cannon of Nickelodeon fame. “We’ve already started discussing online promotions that will catch the attention of youth audiences for this film,” says Panay. Whereas on The Wedding Crashers—another film Panay is finishing for New Line Cinema that stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn—he expects the studio to rely less on online marketing, as the audience skews somewhat older.
Robert Levy, producer of the phenomenally successful Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen direct-to-video movies, agrees. “Young audiences are online. We play extensively to these kids online because we’re both encouraging them to buy these movies and we’re reinforcing Mary Kate and Ashley as a brand.”
While studios struggle with using the Internet as a tool to create box office punch, many Hollywood content-makers feel that using it to develop and extend a brand is the real untapped power of the Internet. Marc Levey, founder of the Producer’s Guild of America’s New Media Council and managing director of Pacific Media Ventures, insists, “The Internet for Hollywood is about community. If you build a branded community that people can participate in, they’ll come back over and over.” Levey points to Hollywood film franchises such as Spiderman, Harry Potter , and Lord Of The Rings. “The online communities for these types of franchises can be huge when they emulate the ‘water cooler’ atmosphere, giving visitors the ability to chat and exchange ideas between installments of movie episodes.”
But branding is serious business. In movies, the brands tend to be movie specific, rather than company specific. With the possible exception of Disney, few people rush out to see the new Universal or Sony film. Because of this reality, each movie’s branded marketing assets—logos, artwork, photographs, movie clips, trailers, and the like—must be created on very short timelines. Digital management of these assets is even more cumbersome.
Managing Assets
For Sony Pictures, producer and distributor of the Spiderman movies, this presents the problem of having to control and centralize access to thousands upon thousands of moving parts. Using INSCI’s ActiveMedia digital asset management (DAM) software as its platform, Sony has created cineSHARE. cineSHARE is designed to move and share marketing materials and stock footage with post, print, finishing, and marketing houses. The system provides secure access to more than 20,000 assets, all of which can now be accessed through the Web. “ActiveMedia has become one of many point solutions used by Sony,” says Mike Koehler, systems engineer for INSCI Corp., developer and marketer of the ActiveMedia software. “All of these point solutions together are wrapped up with a bow and become Sony’s enterprise-wide solution.” As a piece of this enterprise solution, cineSHARE enables access by producers, directors, lawyers, editors, and marketers alike to digital media from around the world and in all parts of the production cycle—digital dailies, location photos, head-shots, and production notes, among others. Because it is Web-based, collaboration can take place in near real time.
“We feel that ActiveMedia really ‘plays well’ with other applications already in use at Sony,” adds Susan Worthy, INSCI’s marketing VP. “In addition to allowing for high customization on the front end, we think that being able to interface with so many other applications is one of the major keys to making this all work.”
Search capabilities also get a high priority. “cineSHARE is basically a big collection of Web-based folders with the ability to execute great searches,” notes INSCI’s Koehler. “Your ability to find what you need with this software is much greater than when we all worked with just FTP.”
Television networks also seek to brand individual programs. But more important for them is the extension of their overall channel brand. “We very intentionally have reached out to online users for our auto-makeover series Pimp My Ride ,” says Beth J. Greenwald, MTV Network’s executive who oversees the popular series. “Kids come to the MTV Web site because they get an overall experience consistent with the culture of our network. That experience is bigger than any one particular show. We tried to grab the attention of these kids by giving them the opportunity to play our Build Your Own Ride game online.” The show quickly became a hit, especially in the 12-34 age range, and it was ultimately seen by more than 80 million viewers in its first season.
Of course, MTV’s problem mirrors Sony’s, but because of the added emphasis on overall channel branding, it’s a struggle that occurs on a longer-term basis. In order to maintain consistency of the MTV brand online, the network turned to Extensis’ DAM software, Portfolio. Extensis’ director of product management, Kirk Sadler, says, “Among other things, MTV has used Portfolio to archive and centralize all of its branded elements. Logos, graphics, video clips, animation, photographs—anything branded—is able to be accessed, sorted, and identified immediately.” This ease of access to multiple terabytes of data allows departments and contractors in many locations to quickly gather the most current brand assets and then use them creatively. Likewise, centralization enables administrators to more easily implement a formalized backup procedure, and Portfolio’s Express feature allows users to transfer data to various other desktop applications through simple drag-and-drop methods. Extensis’ Sadler adds that an unanticipated benefit of the software for MTV is that they’ve vastly sped up internal approval times, thereby allowing MTV’s branded content to go on-air and online more quickly. By ultimately speeding up production time and ensuring a consistent brand identity, Extensis considers MTV’s use of the software a time-saving, competitive advantage for the network.
Distribution
These days, legal online distribution of Hollywood’s content to mainstream audiences appears confined to downloadable movie trailers and program clips. But, as the music industry has quickly discovered, things are changing…and fast. Whereas only a few years ago the download time for a full-length feature film was seven hours or more, widely used broadband connections have cut the time to less than one hour.
A new study conducted by the Motion Picture Association of America and online research firm OTX reports that an astounding 58% of online users in South Korea—where 98% of the population has high-speed Internet access—have downloaded movies. Although the study claims that the number of Americans who have downloaded films is around 24%, the penetration of high-speed access for Americans hovers at only 46%. Clearly, without immediate attention as access to broadband increases, Hollywood is on the verge of some serious piracy problems. According to Derek Wilson, chairman of Neospire, a Dallas-based provider of mission critical managed-hosting services for companies such as ABC Radio, Loews Cineplex, and others, “Our entertainment clients are seriously considering the implications for their Web-accessible content as consumers continue to gain broadband access at such accelerated rates.”
And this, 10 years after the start of “convergence,” is where Hollywood and technology might be showing signs of becoming bedfellows. In addition to developing its electronic anti-piracy protection and digital rights management applications, Hollywood now seems willing to consider accepting the technology industry’s latest overtures. Although each is wary of the other, there’s no question that the ability to quickly and efficiently download a film opens Hollywood’s content to all sorts of new platforms. Even Microsoft has jumped back into the fray. This holiday season, Microsoft expects to debut its Portable Media Center, a handheld PDA capable of playing downloaded movies, music, and other recorded programming.
Likewise, there’s a move to piggyback Hollywood content onto the inroads already being made by wireless gaming. “With hundreds of millions of wireless phones out there and a rapidly accelerating installed base of consumers anxious for its content, Hollywood is pushing hard to merge the worlds of gaming and movies,” says Dominic Ianno. Ianno, formerly VP of merchant bank Europlay Capital Advisors, has worked on merging movie and video game properties such as Terminator 3 and Matrix 2 . He is now EVP at Outlaw Productions, the movie company responsible for such blockbusters as The Santa Clause and Training Day . One company to watch, Ianno says, will be JAMDAT Mobile, the mobile gaming company that filed paperwork in July signaling its intention for an initial public offering. Says Ianno, “After wireless, the next natural leap will be downloadable Hollywood content jumping from your computer to your living room television.”
Levey, the Producer’s Guild’s New Media founder, concurs. “I have no doubt that the Subscription Video On Demand (SVoD) model will win. You’ll turn on your TV, turn to channel 400, choose virtually any movie, download it, and play it in real time…all without leaving your couch.” And yet, with its intense fear of losing control of its content and not yet necessarily having the means to digitally manage it successfully, the notion seems to scare the heck out of Hollywood.
Looking Forward
Some, like Levey, say that Hollywood-content makers still aren’t getting it. He says, “There’s no incentive for the studio’s marketing and distribution departments to really work together internally to figure out how to optimize their digital content for the Internet.” Likewise, adds Richard Schirmer, a studio marketing consultant and former marketing executive at The Walt Disney Company, “Hollywood has always been slow to adapt to change. It’s just in the culture.”
But hope just may be on the horizon. If Hollywood indeed gets a handle on the piracy issue, the landscape is clearly moving rapidly towards allowing easily-downloadable, mainstream access to Hollywood content online.
With distribution now set to be ingrained in the same medium that is currently seeing a resurgence in marketing attention, perhaps Hollywood will finally become focused enough to allow the two to work hand-in-hand online. It’ll become imperative that DAM developers keep these Hollywood’ers supplied with fresh software (and strategies) that will allow them to quickly and consistently extend their properties and their brands online, and to do so in a way that safeguards the creative assets from unauthorized uses. And it’ll be incumbent upon Hollywood to actually accept the use of this technology and leverage it to generate new revenue streams.
Perhaps it will take another Blair Witch -like phenomenon for everyone to take renewed notice, but for those willing to take the leap, the future of Hollywood content online might just be the next rising star worth catching.
Companies Featured in This Article
Deep Focus www.deep-focus.net
Extensis www.extensis.com
INSCI www.insci.com
Neospire www.neospire.com
Motion Picture Association of America www.mpaa.org
MTV www.mtv.com
Producer’s Guild of America’s New Media Council www.pganewmedia.org
Sony Pictures www.sonypictures.com
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