Digital Marketing Now

Recently, we had the opportunity to engage in a dialog at the Variety Film Marketing Summit with three good friends who happen to be some of the smartest people in the room—Dwight Caines from Sony, Ira Rubenstein from Fox and Michael Tritter from Warner Bros.

The consensus? Digital marketing today is not about destination web sites as much as it is about extending your campaigns by activating the appropriate platform where your target consumers spend their time. The goal is no longer simply to reach consumers, but to make them active partners in the campaign.

Like other marketers, movie studios have finally evolved their digital and social efforts from silos into truly integrated campaign elements. “Anything we’re doing is given a social push,” with the studio’s social media team included in strategic discussions and decisions, said Michael Tritter, Warner Brothers’ SVP of Interactive Marketing.

Creating a great trailer is still critical; but when over 50% of consumers are viewing movie trailers online, getting people to interact with that video on their personal computer, to replay it over and over, and to send it on to their friends becomes the gold standard. A well-developed social media campaign has the power to drive exponentially greater impressions for just those reasons. “We have a production budget, where we build features we want people to spend time with, but we also want social extensions,” explained Dwight Caines, Sony’s Worldwide President of Digtial Marketing. “You need a story to tell, but once you start telling that story, one human is big enough to create momentum.”

Watching trailers online has become such an ingrained habit for so many consumers that the launch of a trailer often rivals the launch of the film itself. “We look closely at how we launch each trailer online,” Ira Rubinstein explained. “We look at overall demographic, targeting, strategy.  If you have a very popular movie, you put it in the right place, like Apple, and you’ll get millions of downloads.” And that’s all earned, not paid, media.

Indeed, with the tremendous interest in trailers, launches now have to take into account the same piracy concerns that films releases do. “At Sony, we launch online before we put them in theaters,” Dwight Caines said, “because if we don’t, the first impression will be somebody’s bootleg version.”

With studios now using online channels to release multiple trailers to multiple audiences, it can be a challenge to keep campaigns from feeling fragmented. At Stradella Road, we work hard on our projects to ensure that every piece of video tracks back to a unified message, rather than spinning off and creating splinter campaigns that can end up promising all things to all people and confusing consumers.

Mobile marketing continues to be seen as a significant emerging platform, and studios are definitely testing the waters. “It’s going to be more important than the PC, but it’s not there yet,” offered Ira Rubenstein.

Problems abound for studios finding their way in the mobile space. The app-centric model for smart phone users requires luring people to download something from an app store. That’s a potentially very high bar, which also sets a campaign in competition with a whole world of other apps. And the varying platforms, and varying standards of quality within those platforms, has made it difficult to provide a consistent experience. Michael Tritter said he wished that “Google was more like Apple with controlling the ad systems. It’s getting too fragmented.”

Asked for predictions about the near future of digital marketing, Ira Rubenstein offered that,  “Mobile will become the dominant platform that will matter,” while Michael Tritter saw a world where “co-viewing will become more prominent, and there will be more digital and traditional combinations with digital woven throughout everything.”

Dwight Caines focused on increased consumer choice: “The message will be ‘here are the ways you can see the product at your choice, here the benefits for each, and here’s how we’ll reward you if you do one or more.’”