DigitalSpritz

The Odds Were Not In Their Favor: Ad Age & "The Hunger Games"

Three short days ago, Advertising Age ran a column titled "Why The Hunger Games Won't Make $100 Million Its Opening Weekend."  The article was right -- the movie pulled in $155M through Saturday, and is still racking up the box office numbers.  Oops. 

Controversial headlines and contrary opinions are the stuff of online commentary (I know, I often write them myself).  But this particular article stuck with me, for two reasons:  1) It was published in Ad Age, the grand doyenne of advertising, and 2) I knew the view it expressed was totally, completely and utterly wrong.

The author, Seraj Bharwani, is the chief analytics officer for Visible Measures, which tracks the effectiveness of shared online media.  I appreciate his bravery for going so far out on a limb.   But, in making his predictions, he may have forgotten the first lesson that every good marketer seems to grok intuitively:  Know Thy Audience. 

Know Thy Audience, part 1:  The movie studios.  Studios have a tried-and-true prediction model, developed from their favorite pre-release tracking tool:  consumer surveys.  The model said that John Carter would be a domestic bust.  Guess what?  It was.  The model predicted a plus-$125M opening for Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows 2.  Guess what?  It hit $169M.   The model even got The Dark Knight right, with a plus- $130M forecast (the movie pulled in $158M).  Why suddenly would the tried-and-true be wrong?  Because Visible Measures assumed that Lionsgate didn't know their audience. 

Boston-based Visible Measures is far, far away from Hollywood, so one might assume that the company is not incredibly familiar with the butts-in-seats marketing tactics that are SOP for every movie release.  Those tactics, interestingly enough, still include a huge amount of not-so-online media, which means that an analysis driven solely by online media metrics is going to omit a significant chunk of pertinent data.  If Twitter feeds and online trailers were the only things driving movie attendance, Hollywood would have dropped their other expenditures long ago.  Making and marketing movies is expensive, brah.  Granted, Lionsgate spent a mountain of money online, but the campaigns were much more sophisticated than usual: not many kids' movies do product tie-ups with Rodarte and create Tumblr blogs focusing on fashion.   It bears mentioning that Lionsgate went a step further, and didn't create a single trailer showing the action in the actual Hunger Games themselves, which possibly reduced the significance of the metric given the most weight by Visible Measures' analysis:  online trailer views. 

Which brings me to Know Thy Audience, part 2:  The consumers.   Yes, The Hunger Games (THG) books are a young adult (YA) franchise.  Yes, they have some superficial similarities to the Twilight series, and perhaps an even stronger relationship to Harry Potter, which spanned gender and ages when it came to popularity.  But the depth and breadth of the audience for THG books meant that it was a mistake to assume that the movie audience would not follow the same pattern - which is what happened in the Visible Measures analysis:  they discounted the grownups.  

Forbes' Meghan Casserly does a much better assessment, and she does it by starting in the right place:  with the audience for THG books.  Casserly notes that adults consumed the books in almost equal numbers to the kids (I myself read all three in four days after my teenage daughter handed them to me), meaning that the base for the movie moved way beyond the assumed click-happy YA contingent.  Which also meant that Hollywood's plus-$100M estimate for the opening was right on the money, and then some.

To be fair to Visible Measures, the movie business is often a total crap shoot, where - to quote Shakespeare in Love - the success of any endeavor in the biz "is a mystery."  THG could have been a bad movie (it's not), there could have been a massive East Coast blizzard opening weekend (there wasn't), girls who kick ass could be a theme whose time has passed (it hasn't).  Lionsgate has got a massive hit on their hands:  they knew the odds were in their favor, because they put both online and traditional media to work for them, and because they knew their audience.

Renaming the Kodak Theater

To me, no greater development has highlighted the new world order in the entertainment business than Kodak's blockbuster news today:  The company has asked to be released from the agreement that placed its name on the iconic theater where the Academy Awards are presented. 

If you've ever been in the theater, you also know that there's a small room  - the George Eastman Room - dedicated to the technical advances in filmmaking that were driven by Kodak, which as a company, has received nine Academy Awards. 

Those days are over.  But what's not clear is who's up next.  In a universe where the creator of a computer company became the largest shareholder in the world's most iconic movie studio, it's apparent that the next power player in Hollywood may just be based in the Valley - and by that, I mean Silicon Valley. 

So ... with that in mind, let's vote on some new names for the Theater-Formerly-Known-As-Kodak.  If you don't see one you like here, put your nomination in the comments. 

 

Online poll from GoPollGo

Content Curation: The Big Boulder in the Digital River

Big news in the entertainment world last night:  YouTube (Google) is finally entering the world of video-on-demand  (VOD) in a competitive way.  “Competitive” means by offering contemporary movies near their DVD release dates, rather than only catalog titles, which have actually been available on YouTube via an innovative variable pricing model for some time.   Now YouTube has apparently inked a deal with several major and independent studios to offer movies for download about the same time the DVD’s hit retail. 

However, none of this news is official, and the deal is apparently incomplete, as rumor has it that Paramount, Disney and Fox are currently holdouts.   The reason?  Well, there are two:  1) Google continues to point traffic towards and provide advertising services for sites that practice piracy, and 2) Viacom (Paramount’s parent company) has been locked in a lawsuit with YouTube over copyright infringement for several years. 

All of this is the result of fundamental mistrust centered on one principle:  content curation.  For those who may have forgotten recent history, YouTube sprang to prominence on the back of a single piece of content – Lazy Sunday – that was recorded from a broadcast of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, setting the stage for the explosive growth that followed, much of it driven by what traditional media considers illegally-uploaded entertainment.    However, non-traditional media doesn’t see it that way:  digital presents an unparalleled opportunity that should be mined.  If the situation doesn’t fit old paradigms, bend the paradigms.  Hence, YouTube applies advertising against content that belongs to studios and shares the revenue, and Google supplies services to sites that promote piracy. 

However, the world has evolved, and traditional media practitioners are now skilled at serving their content over the internet and via mobile devices – often leaving Google and YouTube out of the equation.  The problem has evolved from one of content deficit to what Seth Godin calls attention deficit  -- someone needs to aggregate all this content and point people to the good stuff.  YouTube, with its audience and bandwidth, bolstered by Google’s traffic skills and deep pockets, is well-positioned to perform this role, and is ready to a bend a few of its own paradigms to do so.  However, the friction remains:  Can studios come to believe that the online network famous for cat videos and bootlegged TV show clips will evolve into a premiere VOD destination?   And can YouTube honor the concerns of its studio partners without blowing apart its own ecosystem, which is built on the philosophy of wholly independent media?