Paramount's 'An Inconvenient Truth' Marketing Taps Current Events

With the brutal heat wave making headlines across the country, the marketing team behind ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ have spun current events into a creative series of advertisements, according to the “Marketplace Report” broadcast yesterday on American Public Media:

Global warming might seem like counter-intuitive programming for folks trying to escape the heat, but the new ad campaign for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" has used the toasty weather to its advantage.

Newspaper ads for the film now list scorching temperatures in several US cities.

"It's kind of unusual in the 7th, 8th week of release to have fresh ad campaigns going out to keep a film in the public eye. I think it's been pretty effective."

The film has grossed just under $19 million through July 24th (very impressive for such a "didactic" documentary), and the platform release up to the current peak of 560+ theaters has been handled exceptionally well by the Paramount team. Keeping a film"fresh" during a long roll-out is one of the biggest challenges in film marketing, and tying into current events on both the publicity and advertising fronts is a smart approach to achieve that end.

The film is likely on track to gross in the $20-22 million dollar range, and has a good chance of usurping ‘Bowling for Columbine’ for the number three spot on the list of top-grossing documentaries of all time (‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ holds the top spot at $119 million, and ‘March of the Penguins’ is at #2 with $77.4 million).

Paramount Vantage and the Sierra Club Promo 'An Inconvenient Truth' with Robo-calls

According to Variety, last week Paramount Vantage and The Sierra Club teamed up to promote the release of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ with “robo-calls” – the same sort of prerecorded telephone calls that are usually used to promote political candidates.

On July 7th, approximately 300,000 of the automated calls were placed in New York and four other key markets. The call was a 38 second message from Al gore urging the listener to get out and see his film about global warming, which began like this:

"Hi, I'm Al Gore. The fight against global warming is not about right vs. left, it's about right vs. wrong. That's why the Sierra Club and I are asking you to see my film, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' this weekend.”

According to the article, this is the first time this technique has been used to promote a film, and at least one studio executive believes that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real question is if people will consider this sort of "push" advertising as an intrusion or not. If done well and correctly targeted, it may work for certain genres of films -- political documentaries and comedies come to mind. And If this technique could be paired with Moviefone-like ticketing capabilities, the ROI tracking capabilities would be a huge boon to movie marketers.

‘An Inconvenient Truth’ has grossed $15.6 million since its release in late May.

Paramount Partners with Technorati in Blog Marketing Initiative

According to Clickz, Technorati, the blog search engine, is scheduled to announce a multi-year movie marketing agreement with Paramount Pictures today. The article states that Technorati will aggregate relevant blog posts about Paramount films for use on the films' websites, and will provide ads and custom content as well. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The first film to get the Technorati treatment will be "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's new film about global warming:

Posts will appear today on the film's promotional site, Climatecrisis.net, which was created by Paramount. Aggregated information will discuss the film as well as the general topic of global warming. Paramount editors can highlight interesting or controversial posts on their own site. The site also features RSS feeds on global warming-related topics from major news sources.

The aggregated content will not contain full text posts, according to David Sifry, Technorati founder and CEO. "It's to drive people back to the blog. [Bloggers will] feel empowered. It's kind of like 21st century letters to the editor. It's setting the agenda. And for the studio, it's showing the power of the people formerly known as your audience. Rather than ask people to blog on their site, which has proven somewhat difficult for many film companies, they're collecting it."

From a movie marketing standpoint, Gore's film is the perfect choice due to the sheer size the democratic and activist blogger pools. However, it may be more difficult to promote films that have a less easily segmented audience, so it will be interesting to see which films they decide to promote on the site in the future.

Another interesting angle is that this partnership may spur individual bloggers to write posts about a given film for a chance at getting traffic from the film's official website, something we haven't seen before. We're also assuming that the aggregation will have to be hand-culled, since an automated system could lead to spam, or worse, a situation where a Fox or Sony related-post could appear on the Paramount site.

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Technorati Tags: Movie Marketing, Paramount, Al Gore

Studios Clamoring For Trailer Slots in Front of 'Star Wars: Episode III'

According to the Los Angeles Times, the highly-anticipated 'Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith' is bowing in 3,700 theaters, and movie marketing executives are jockeying for coveted trailer slots. Further exacerbating the demand is Lucas' demand that no more than five trailers bow before his feature. Given how lackluster the box office has been so far this year, many films are banking on this added push to help get butts in seats:

Others in the mix, according to another studio: New Line's 'Wedding Crashers,' DreamWorks' 'The Island,' Universal's 'Cinderella Man' and Warner Bros.' 'Batman Begins.' And some studios are also sending trailers for other films directly to exhibitors in hopes of screening with 'Revenge of the Sith.' Sony, for example, is distributing a new "teaser" trailer for 'The Da Vinci Code,' even though the movie doesn't come out for a year

The article mentions that the only film guaranteed placement is 'The Fantastic Four.' Of all of these films, the films that probably need the marketing boost most are New Line's 'Wedding Crashers,' and Universal's 'Cinderella Man.'


[Via the Los Angeles Times]

Dreamwork's 'Madagascar' trailered on a Paramount DVD

According to Video Business, the upcoming Dreamworks film 'Madagascar' has been trailered on Paramount's DVD release of 'Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events'. Although header trailers of new releases have been on DVDs for some time, this is the first instance of a competing studio's trailer on a DVD.

The unusual move is due to pre-existing promotional agreements between Dreamworks and Paramount:

This unusual case of a studio promoting another's fare came about because Lemony Snicket is a Paramount and Dreamworks co-production and thus the two are splitting domestic and international DVD revenue. The CG-animated Madagascar, however, is not a co-production.
DreamWorks and Universal Studios Home Entertainment discs often include cross-promotion of each other's movies, but that's attributable to the fact that Universal is DreamWorks' distribution partner. Paramount entered the mix back in November 2004, when DreamWorks' Shrek 2 DVDs featured a trailer for Lemony Snicket.

There just happens to be another great article in VB today discussing the inevitability of third-party studio commercials on DVDs. Today, a partner trailer, tomorrow, a Pepsi ad? Is this the opening salvo towards greater ad exploitation of the DVD platform?


[Via Video Business Online]