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Great teams create strong outcomes… Four years ago we invested in Appssavvy because we believe that social actions generate effective branding and conversion opportunities for advertisers.
This week saw the announcement that Appssavvy has raised $7.1M to build out their “Adtivity” platform. This investment round included AOL Ventures along with existing investors True Ventures and the New York Times Co. and brings the total amount raised to $10.2 million.
Adtivity initiates ad delivery upon user activity and engagement with content. As CEO Chris Cunningham says, “The future of how publishers build games and communities is not around page views and impressions.”
AdAge notes that the technology is being used by 74 publishers including Disney and social-gaming companies CrowdStar, OMGPOP and Arkadium. Brand advertisers including American Express, Chase and Coca-Cola have run campaigns using the platform.
Congratulations to Chris and his great team.
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We are proud to report that Digital Broadcast Group, one of our Stradella Road investments, has been named to Forbes’ annual list of America’s Most Promising Companies for 2011. To make Forbes’ list, companies are evaluated against rigorous criteria, taking into account sales growth, product development, partnerships, customer sentiment and industry-specific data. DBG ranked #3 on the list of 100 up-and-coming companies.
Founded in 2006, DBG produces online videos—marketing disguised as entertainment—for corporations and places them (as well as traditional video ads) among a network of 2,600 websites. Customers include Wal-Mart Stores, American Express, Coca-Cola and Ford and the company has raised $2.5 million in funding since 2008.
Congratulations to Chris Young and a great team of dedicated and passionate employees.
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Perseverance and experience are two things that we really believe in when evaluating start-up talent with an eye toward investment. In the case of Miso, it was Somrat Niyogi that sealed the deal for us when we invested three years ago.
Miso leverages what is increasingly coming to be known as “social gamification”: They award participants points and badges for interacting with content built around TV show and movie check-ins via apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and the web. Miso is now partnering with DIRECTV and AT&T U-Verse to allow its app to communicate with the TV receiver and let viewers know what’s on their TV at the moment and where they are in the show.
This past week, Miso raised $4 million in new funding from Khosla Ventures, with existing investors Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media participating in the round. Our congratulations to Somrat and his team!
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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.’”
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Stradella Road was pleased to once again co-produce the Variety Film Marketing Summit, which brings together industry leaders from both major and independent studios, as well as pioneering marketing and technology companies. The following is the second in a series highlighting key issues, strategies and opportunities that came to light amidst some very candid conversations.
The State of Theatrical Film Marketing. More choices. More voices. Longer—seemingly endless—campaigns. Marketing a major movie release these days requires navigating your way through a constantly moving, three-dimensional chessboard.
Content may still be King, but the King faces dire risk of losing his head without a wide-ranging, yet flexible, strategic plan. A distributor needs to be aware of the marketing implications of every stage of production, to develop a crystal-clear message that realistically takes into account pre-existing sentiments, to hold an open and candid discussion with consumers during the course of a campaign and to have a coherent plan to reach audiences across platforms.
With films today, the marketing job begins the day a project is announced. With every choice—from casting to costumes—likely to be picked over and judged, internet sentiment can turn against a film before the first frame is shot, a burden some campaigns never overcome. “You can’t announce your title, your date, the casting choices, without thinking of it as a piece of marketing,” says Oren Aviv, Fox’s President of Domestic Theatrical Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer. “Everything is marketing.”
With such a high level of scrutiny, the days of being able to put lipstick on a pig may well be over. For a movie to succeed, the product itself has to set the tone. “The DNA of a movie has the marketing arc in it,” says Josh Goldstein, Universal’s Marketing President. “A lot of the themes, the reasons you’ll connect to a movie exist in the most nascent stages, so part of the job is teasing that out and having those conversations at the beginning.”
For the film Horrible Bosses, “we branded it for comedy with a certain look. We developed each character so you understood them and their relationships with their bosses, selling the concept,”
explains Sue Kroll, President of Worldwide Marketing for Warner Brothers. For Bridemaids, on the other hand, Universal found the film’s essence in its unexpected, female-driven vulgarity, an off-color counterpoint to the hugely successful Hangover franchise.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, like many tentpole franchises, needed to overcome pre-existing negative consumer sentiment about prior installments in the series before its campaign could gain traction. “We were fighting perception about a cheesy franchise,” recalls Oren Aviv. “We only had one visual effects shot, seven and a half seconds long of Caesar turning his head and looking. But it was strategically dead on. Character driven, relationship driven, not monkey mayhem. We made that the center of the campaign.”
Once the core message is established, the question becomes how to best distribute it—choosing from a vast array of tools and platforms. The key is “looking at releasing info in the trailer and then releasing more online that is really customized,” says Ann Globe, Worldwide Head of Marketing and Consumer Products for Dreamworks Animation. “You can have three cuts, twenty cuts, but you have to find your way.”
Providing multiple versions of trailers and clips and behind-the-scenes pieces offers marketers a chance to show they are hearing consumers and reacting in real-time to the sentiments of target audiences. “Very rarely is it only one trailer; you tweak your message,” says Kroll.
Of course, a world of infinite seeming possibilities poses its own challenges. “The more we can explore a variety of platforms the greater the chance of people seeing our stuff. But it’s very expensive to be on all those platforms,” says Aviv. “It all comes down to your choices.” How are you going to put your bucket of money to best use? Is it PR vs. TV vs. Internet? Or can you find the elusive spot where each campaign element truly builds on the others?
When a major studio confidently puts it’s know-how and resources behind a creative campaign the results are clear: Consumers get excited enough about a release that they become its advocates, online and off. “It’s a very dynamic time in marketing,” says Josh Goldstein. “Our relationships with our customers are changing. The game and playbook is changing. But at the same time the human animal doesn’t change that much and what people respond to emotionally hasn’t changed that much.”
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Stradella Road was pleased to once again co-produce the Variety Film Marketing Summit, which brings together industry leaders from both major and independent studios, as well as pioneering marketing and technology companies. The following is the first in a series highlighting key issues, strategies and opportunities that came to light amidst some very candid conversations.
Marketing Across Windows. Marketing across product release windows, through multiple platforms and types of viewing experiences, marks one of the greatest challenges and opportunities facing the entertainment industry today. It is the type of business model disruption that can radically shift balance sheets, as well as the balance of power—witness the rise of iTunes and Amazon.com, and the rise (and fall?) of Netflix.
We see four core issues for marketers: Coping with the complexity of messaging, moving beyond lip service to actual inter-departmental cooperation, dealing with discoverability, and really getting a handle on how social media ties all the pieces together.
With movies distributed across so many platforms—theaters, multiple flavors of 3D, iTunes and Netflix, Video on Demand—marketers need to figure out how much time and resource goes to explaining how and where a film can be found without letting a campaign’s larger message get lost. “Every second you spend telling people where to get something or how to get something, that’s a second you’re not telling them about the product,” said TJ Moffett, Executive Vice President of Home Entertainment Marketing for Summit Entertainment, the studio behind the hugely successful Twilight franchise.
“We’re still seeing double-digit growth for VOD,” said Audrey Freeborn, Fox’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for Worldwide Video On Demand and Electronic Sell-Through. “But now we’re also accessing more rooms of the house. The store is in the kid’s bedroom, he can buy in on his Xbox, and now we can go with you on the train, on the plane.”
“Ideally you would say, ‘Get it Tuesday.’ Just shut up and sell the movie,” Moffett said. But while you have to show your product in its best light, you have to deal with the reality of platforms with wildly varying experiences and calendars. The balance is critical.
The need for coherence in messaging requires a previously unprecedented level of teamwork across departments, Freeborn said. “Collaboration between digital, home and games, is much more than it was five years ago, as is the need for a more targeted approach. There is more of an emphasis than ever on having a cohesive message.”
The power of social media further reinforces the need for more cohesive messaging. Your Facebook page is your Facebook page, regardless of the business models and interests behind release windows. “There has to be a persistent connection to the audience,” said Vince Broady, CEO of social media publishing platform ThisMoment. “One cohesive program that starts in theatrical, runs through to home entertainment and bridges the gap between multiple installments of a series.”
The challenge in maintaining that level of consistency and awareness throughout the product cycle is compounded by increasingly savvy online audiences who demand more and more information about a film, while at the same time having increasingly short attention spans prone to tuning out marketing the moment it fails to stimulate their interest.
“All the beats have to be continuously hitting in an engaging way,” said Scott Nocas, a multi-platform entertainment consultant who has worked on both the Playstation and X-Box platforms. “You have to be constantly engaging the consumer even when you don’t have something to sell them or they aren’t going to come back two years from now when it appears.”
The diversity of new platforms has, perhaps paradoxically, not always made it easier for marketers to connect with audiences. The issue is one of discoverability, as new services struggle to present their offerings. VOD, and other interfaces, deliver a largely alphabetically-arranged browsing experience that doesn’t lend itself to consumers easily stumbling upon titles, as they might have while strolling the aisles of a video store. How do you get into the Top 10 or Most Recommended or Hot Titles lists? “You have to somehow overcome this discovery challenge or you’re dead,” Nocas said.
This, of course, is why so much attention is being focused on social media—the place where consumers can see what their friends are seeing, and interest clusters can find their way to content together. “The idea that we can muscle our way into your world, that’s becoming harder and harder” Broady said. “You have to earn an authentic connection with a consumer at a much higher level then you used to.”
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