Is Movie Marketing Now Truly Broken?
We've never found the right way to position films for the what that is today.
We generally blame on at least one of five specific things for everything in the FilmBiz that doesn’t work as we hoped:
Media Overload
Engineered Distraction & The Resultant Attention Deficit Syndrome
The Pandemic (that ‘ol chestnut)
The pivot to Global Streaming Dominance, and
Social media.
Sure they are all connected, but they are all distinct too.
And then we quote William Goldman and expect everyone to just nod their head in agreement. And by we, I don’t mean “me”! I don’t buy that pony, pally.
I think it is a case of all of us having been infected with two major character flaws that lead us to never look at root causes:
our refusal to address anything on a long term strategic basis particularly when short term satisfaction is at hand, and
our denial to take responsibility for our own shit. We just want to flush it all away and “don’t worry; be happy”.
These two afflictions have given us global climate disaster, materialist consumer culture, a polarized political minefield, the need for people to feel “better than” others, corporate-control of our world, collosal wealth inequality, diminishing social mobility, endless wars, senseless aggression and a whole lot more. Including the cinemamakers’ predicament of how we can’t make good movies work these days.
The Streamers’ business goals to date have primarily been about customer acquisition. I initially thought it was audience acquisition. I guess that was my optimistic thinking that the Big Picture was to take transform customers into audience. That was at least how they phrased it. When I ran Fandor, a start up boutique streamer in San Francisco, several team members had no hesitation to tell me what my job was. They said it was audience acquisition there too, and they said that the way you do it is to provide a consistent cadence of a consistent quality product in an environment that people trust and want to participate in. Simple right?
And that “secret formula” is how you build any audience or community, but in streaming it translates as providing a new film or show every week. Ideally a good one and one somehow like the one you served last week. And if you are trying to build audiences (in the plural) you can multiply that order for each and every audience segment. So when Netflix and Disney and others said their business goal was a movie a week, they probably truly meant for each segment, which basically translates into a new movie or show a day. They were never going to be able to hire enough people to succeed — and particularly to market those films well.
There is a significant difference between audience and customer acquisition.
If you are looking to build audience, you are committed to developing them. If you are only trolling for customers, the only goal is access to their wallets. Audiences need curation. Audiences need discussion. They need education. They need participation. They need community. Customers need an environment where they buy more and more things. Businesses focused on customer acquisition need to reach more and more people, which means the specificity of their offerings need to change. They need to make offers. If you are in the culture business you can see why there might be a bit of friction between audience development and customer acquisition.
*** we interrupt this post to encourage you to…***
Watch Invisible Nation:
Oct 22-26 with a live panel discussion on Sunday, October 26th.
tix here: https://togetherfilms.org/blog/invisible-nation-protect-democracy-screening-series/
FWIW, we are now in year three of release, deliberately without being a global streaming platform.
And yes this is the film that Taiwan’s Vice President just cited as key to their diplomatic needs “Citing the acclaimed documentary “Invisible Nation,” the VP said it is unfair that many countries in the world do not recognize Taiwan.”’
and now back to our post..
Which leads us to where we are now.
Film marketers once wanted a minimum six month window from delivery to position and market each title. It seems now that they rarely even get six weeks. We changed our vernacular to accommodate too. We used to “launch” films; now we “drop” them.
Is it any surprise that there is no awareness on titles. Personally speaking, even titles I am tracking drop without me knowing. It’s crazy. Nobody knows when movies come out now. Way back in the local video store days, people loved the “Coming Soon” board. We love to anticipate things. When you look forward to something you tend to enjoy it more because you want to get a return on all that anticipation you invested. Yup, anticipatory joy is gone, baby, gone.
