Bollywood Embraces Online Movie Marketing
With the burgeoning growth on India’s online population, Bollywood movie marketers are ramping up their online marketing efforts, according to The Hindu Business Line.
According to the article, over 38.5 million Indians have Internet access, and although broadband penetration is in its early stages, over 1.5 million homes already have high-speed access. There are also an estimated 20 million Indians living abroad who are interested in keeping up with the latest Bollywood productions.
Indian film marketers have noted that young, tech-oriented professionals with disposable income are highly likely to use the web to discover movies to see in theaters:
Says Rajnish R., Head - Digital Marketing Revenue and Strategic Business, MSN India: "People who use the Internet are twice likely to go watch movies in multiplexes (than those who do not). Indians abroad go online to read movie reviews before they book a ticket or buy the DVD. So, the adoption of online media is attractive to new-age producers, who themselves are Net-savvy." Online promotions on large portals such as MSN India typically cost between 800,000 and one million rupees ($17-25K dollars). Promotions on Indiafm, Bollywood's #1 movie portal vary from 50,000 to 1.2 million rupees ($1100 -$26,100) depending on the targeted regions and audience.
Individual film sites are also become more common, and traffic has been booming – Hungama, a top online promotions company for Bollywood, noted that some of their larger sites attract up to 12 million page views a month. Online interactive contests are also becoming popular, and are now sporting major corporate sponsors.
The migration to more sophisticated online marketing methods mirror’s Bollywood’s increasing marketing savvy in other channels. Recent calls for more integrated marketing have increased lately, even culminating in top talent calling for the emulation of Hollywood-style marketing.
The Indian film industry sold more than 3.8 billion tickets in 2005, grossing over $1.14 billion dollars, according to a recent article on Bloomberg. By comparison, Hollywood grossed nearly $9 billion dollars during the same calendar year.
Foreign Film Marketing Insights from Picturehouse's Bob Berney
There was a great piece on The Reeler yesterday about the difficulties facing the marketing and distribution of Foreign film. Framed by the recent shutdown of Wellspring, Berney talks about the challenges faced in marketing the recent Picturehouse releases '13 Tzameti' and 'Ushpin', and he describes the difficulties in breaking out of the typical art house and in finding the core audience. It's definitely worth checking out...
Wellspring Theatrical Distribution Division to Cease Operations
Genius Products is shutting down the theatrical distribution arm at Wellspring, the indie DVD label the company acquired last year. According to Variety, the decision to shutter the label was largely affected by a theatrical distribution partnership announced with the Weinstein Company late last year, a move which effectively eliminated the need for a costly theatrical distribution arm:
A Genius spokesman said that Wellspring will remain a label under the Genius banner but would not elaborate on how many employees the label would have.
Genius said that the move to fold Wellspring's efforts into its other divisions would save about $1 million in annual overhead expenses. This move exemplifies just how hard of a climate it is to market foreign films theatrically right now. The studios' specialty divisions have been churning out sophisticated, independent fare and English language docs over the last several years, and the net effect has been an erosion of foreign film market share. Genius Products will benefit down the line though, because the 700+ Foreign titles from the Wellspring library will surely rebound in value when consumer tastes realign with foreign fare.
Killer Biopic Stirs Controversy in Canada
According to the Montreal Gazette, 'Karla', a film about notorious Canadian killers Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo was pulled from the screening schedule of the Montreal Film Festival due to a political and sponsor backlash:
In recent months, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty had been urging people not to go see the movie, which documents the story of Canada's most notorious couple and the brutal killings of schoolgirls Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.
McGuinty congratulated the Montreal film festival organizers Thursday for cancelling the screening, which had been scheduled for later this month.
"These crimes were searing events in the life of this province," McGuinty said. "I have not understood how people would want to profit from that."
Sellers said he knew Air Canada, a sponsor of the Montreal festival, did not want its logo to be posted during the screening of Karla, and he believes the airline was among those sponsors pressuring the festival to drop the movie. So has all of the negative publicity hurt the producer's chances for finding an audience? According to Quantum Entertainment producer Michael Sellers, Apparently not: Sellers also said all the publicity generated by politicians like McGuinty speaking against the movie, and the cancellation by the Montreal festival, have actually helped his cause.
"I've had two other film festivals and two or three other distributors call already this morning, so the news value of this and the controversy may in the end be positive," he said. Will politicians ever learn? If you don't want people to go see a movie, leave it alone. Instead, there are now over 300 articles on Google News, providing hundreds of free column inches -- the dream of every indie movie marketer. Right now, it looks like the producers are working the "freedom of artistic expression" and "no one's dragging you to see this" PR angles, which are straight out of the ol' Miramax playbook. Changing the films name from the generic "Deadly" to "Karla" was a pretty brash move, however, and looks like a blatant move to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Karla Homolka's recent release from prison. We don't care about all that though -- we're still shell-shocked from reading that the flick stars Laura Prepon from "The 70's Show" -- count us in! [Via the Montreal Gazette] [ 'Karla' Official Site]
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