Emmys Integral to HBO's DVD Marketing Efforts
We all know about the "Oscar" bounce for theatrical titles, but here's some interesting info about how the Emmys help HBO's marketing from Yesterday's Broadcasting & Cable Magazine:
But it's only in the DVD business that HBO execs expect to see any direct correlation between the Emmys and business. While an Oscar may boost the box office for a movie still playing in theaters, HBO executives say Emmy awards have no evident effect on their subscriber sales.
"We do sell ourselves on the quality of our programming," Strauss says, "so anything that burnishes the brand and shines it up you like to have."
The article describes the massive amount of Emmys won by HBO, and then goes on to describe their impact on the DVD market:
The DVD market offers HBO its biggest payoff. HBO Video President Henry McGee loved the exposure of the miniseries' sweeping all four acting categories it was eligible for, sending co-stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Mary Louise Parker and Jeffery Wright up to the stage. "Emmys can be very helpful in focusing on a program," says McGee, "particularly for HBO, when we're in approximately 30 million homes, just a fraction of TV homes."
The Sopranos and Sex and the City have moved so many DVDs that the network nearly recouped the entire production costs of early seasons from DVD sales alone. (The bar was raised when actors got raises in the later seasons.)
That was unimaginable when HBO approved and budgeted the series. Including DVDs, syndication and theatrical movies, more than 20% of HBO's revenues is from sources other than subscription TV.
The network has high hopes for Angels DVDs, but HBO won't likely match the success of The Sopranos. "Angels is a $60 million project. You would never expect to recoup that in ancillary markets," McGee says. But, he adds, HBO does hope to attract new viewers as the acclaim for Angels spreads.
HBO is in an enviable position -- they've got the Midas touch right now. Sure, maybe Carnivale wasn't as hot as it could've been and maybe Arliss has been limping along for the last five years, but when you square that with the hits -- that's pretty enviable.
Name one theatrical studio that has the cachet of HBO right now...
Broadcasting & Cable - Angels, Emmys and DVD
Fake Murder Posters - Clever or Crass Indie Movie Marketing?
Posted on Tuesday September 28, 2004
Filed under
Independent
Francis Xavier promoted his indie flick "Johnny Come Lately" by plastering the streets of Baltimore with fake reward posters seeking a murderer. Unfortunately, it looks like Mr. Xavier didn't take into account the negative backlash:
Misleading. Exploitative. A senseless and painful ruse. That's the reaction from those for whom the murder of a child is reality, not fiction.
"When I really learned its purpose, my knee-jerk reaction was something parents of murdered children say – murder is not entertainment," says Roberta Roper. "You have to walk in someone's shoes to appreciate that journey."
So how did Xavier respond? He claims "he didn't intend to mislead or offend":
"I was just hoping people would go to the Web site and notice it's a movie." While he has no second thoughts about his ad campaign, he realizes that the poster might make some parents wince. He has a 12-year-old daughter and twin 6-month-old sons. "That picture represents everything that is lost in the city every day."
He says the poster was an easy and inexpensive way to promote the film. "We're starving artists,” says Xavier, 42. "We didn't have any money for any big-time marketing. That poster was the only thing I could really think of to get people to notice the movie."
Personally, I think this trumps the lame, misleading "Godsend" effort at generating controversy from earlier this year.
Listen up Indie marketers: the old adage of "all press is good press" refers to celebrities, NOT indie films. I know it's exciting to see your film's title plastered all over the printed page, but bad press like this is completely USELESS in brokering the sale of your film. Why? Because clippings of this sort are completely unusable to a potential distributor. They only draw attention to the marketing and not to the substance of the film. They add no color, no insight, no pullquotes, and they draw attention to the director's inexperience and lack of judgement, thus making the content of the film open to that same line of critique.
The goodwill generated by the "18,000" website hits (always be leery of someone using "hits" to describe web traffic in 2004) is completely negated by the 80,000 or more negative print impressions he probably received. And worse, now this marketing ploy is THE hook for the film, so most upcoming reviews will be "tainted" with references to the stunt (not to mention the fact that some reviewers will now come in with a NEGATIVE bias).
Your marketing and publicity efforts should focus on garnering POSITIVE press for your clip book. If you're thinking about doing a provocative stunt, the consequences can be the unintentional "labeling" of your film by the media, and it might not be very flattering. Just remember that:
positive press = film festival interest.
positive press = distributor interest.
positive press = audience interest.
I'm interested to know what you all think. Am I being too harsh here? What would you guys have done?
Journal Gazette | 09/27/2004 | Phony film poster gets bad reviews
Universal's Marketing Department Gets Schooled the G.E. Way
So we haven't heard much in the media about how the recent Universal acquisition has affected the way they market movies, but this recent article gives some compelling insight on their synergistic exploits:
Universal executives now regularly travel to NBC Universal's offices in New York for quarterly budget reviews and strategic planning sessions, topics that were discussed previously but never with such intensity and frequency. Movie marketing executives are teamed with their counterparts at the NBC television network to find new ways to promote the movies. (The studio had never been aligned with a network.) And Hollywood agents and producers said they were being told by production executives that they must hold the line on costs.
Universal has stumbled so far this year. Can "scientific management" work in the context of movie marketing? The Hollywood story teems with past attempts of mega-corporations at "taming the beast," but history seems to show that the studios operate best as autonomous units.
Six Sigma: A Hollywood Studio Learns the G.E. Way | theledger.com
