Viacom's Acquisition of iFilm Nears Completion
Posted on Thursday October 13, 2005
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Viacom is close to wrapping up their previously reported acquisition of iFilm, the online short film and entertainment portal, ZDNet reports. The deal, which is hovering around the $50 million mark, is entering the shareholder approval stage.
This looks like a good fit for Viacom -- not only do they get a piece of the burgeoning online advertising market, but the acquisition also bodes well for Movie and T.V. Marketers at Viacom's own properties like Paramount and MTV. iFilm doesn't have anywhere near the profile or traffic of Time Warner's Moviefone, but if you annualized iFilm's 4.2+ million monthly visitors, you're looking at around 50 million yearly visits -- a very sizable audience, with much of it in the juciest demographics. The deal looks like it's coming in at one dollar per annual visitor -- It would be interesting to know what iFilm's average revenue per visitor is...
[Via ZDNet]
Paramount Launches Film Website Targeting Playstation Portable Users
Posted on Monday October 10, 2005
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Paramount Pictures Interactive Marketing has announced the launch of the first movie website targeted at PlayStation Portable users. The special site is for the upcoming 'Get Rich or Die Tryin', a hip-hop themed film starring "50 cent" and directed by Academy Award-nominated director Jim Sheridan.
The site, launching at http://www.50psp.com, has been designed to to take advantage of PSP's screen size and surfing capabilities. Media featured on the site the will include PSP trailers, wallpapers, webisodes, and photos that PSP users can download directly to their PSP devices.
Commenting on the selection of this particular film, Amy Powell, vice president of Interactive Marketing for Paramount Pictures commented that "'Get Rich or Die Tryin'' is a perfect match for the first PSP-exclusive movie site; the PSP is huge in the hip-hop community and 50's fans are avid PSP users."
In analyzing the site, it looks like the design philosophy in creating websites for the PSP follows much of the same principles as designing for other various handhelds -- basically, you need to strip out all of the excess coding and shoehorn the content into a 480 pixel-wide screen. If you're looking to hire a developer to design a site that will work with the PSP, be sure they're familiar with crafting sites that work for the NetFront browser, which now comes standard with the PlayStation Portable 2.0 Operating System. You can also visit this link for some basic design guidelines.
[ Via Yahoo Finance]
Design Showcase Illustrates 'Corpse Bride' Web Marketing Strategy
Posted on Wednesday October 5, 2005
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If you haven't seen iMedia Connection's Creative Showcases yet, you should definitely take a look. Basically, the creative director of a recent online marketing campaign outlines their project's marketing goals and then details how their design fulfills those goals. The end product is also critiqued by a panel of several industry experts who, according to iMedia Connection, assess the work based on "how the creative captures the specific customer; how it meets the brand's business needs; impact of execution; and creativity." More than a few of the showcases have covered recent film industry online campaigns. For example, In this week's showcase, BLITZ CEO Gregg Apirian described his firm's user segmentation approach to the 'Corpse Bride" website:
With such a vast audience spectrum, the "Corpse Bride" website was designed to suit four main audience types: the cursory users, curious users, interested users and fanatical users. Building the site in tiers allows users to find what they like easily. The deeper their interest, the deeper the website content. The longer users stay on the site, the more connected they become with the movie, and the higher the probability that they’ll go out to see the feature film come Friday night.
Other recent movie marketing showcases have included the multi-faceted 'Cry Wolf' online campaign, the 'Ring 2' viral, and a 'Dukes of Hazzard' interactive game.
[Via
iMedia Connection]
