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Overhype

by Mike Masnick

Mon, Mar 15th 2004 1:31pm





Hollywood Still Experimenting With Releasing Movie Snippets Online

from the not-new... dept

Anonymous M. submits this story about a new Hollywood movie called Taking Lives, where part of the promotional plan is to let people watch the first nine minutes online. M. notes that this wasn't the first time this has happened, as apparently "last summer, there was a campaign that let you watch the first 6 minutes or so of '28 Days Later.'" Of course, that wasn't new either. We first wrote about studios offering the beginnings of movies online four years ago when producers put the first 7 minutes of Chicken Run online. At the time, I really thought it would become more popular, but in four years, it seems like it hasn't gone very far. Thinking about it, though, it's not that surprising. With a regular trailer, a promotions staff can carefully create the message they're trying to sell to get people into the seats. That's more difficult with the first however many minutes of a movie, where a story needs to be told. The risk, of course, is that for any bad movie, if the first 8 minutes aren't convincing enough, this tactic will cause more harm than good. So, as I predicted then, if this did catch on, movie makers would start to try to game the system, but creating an especially carefully done opening to make sure it could be used for promotional purposes. Related to this, though, you have to wonder why, in this case, they're only leaving this promotion online until the actual movie comes out. Why not put it online when it's out as well? In fact, why not put the file on the various file sharing networks to make sure as many people as possible watch it? If the idea is that you want more people to watch this promotion to convince them to go see the movie, wouldn't it make sense to put it in more places where people might watch it? Of course, if they did that, it would be easy to show yet another "legitimate use" of a file sharing system, and the movie industry could never allow that to happen.

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  1.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    Jeremiah, Mar 15th, 2004 @ 7:40pm

    An indie film I scored last winter may be promoted in a similar manner. I think it's a good way to suck people into your story and production, and give them a chance to see if your project is worth their $7-$10.

    The major downside is that to really enjoy the teaser, a user needs a broadband internet connection, a computer with appropriate playback software, enough understanding to use it effectively, and nine uninterrupted minutes.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    their concern is trackability

    identicon
    Brian Clark, Mar 16th, 2004 @ 3:34am

    Mike wrote: In fact, why not put the file on the various file sharing networks to make sure as many people as possible watch it? If the idea is that you want more people to watch this promotion to convince them to go see the movie, wouldn't it make sense to put it in more places where people might watch it? Mike, I think most of the studios are more concerned with trackability and reach than whether P2P has legitimate uses (don't think for a second they wouldn't co-opt P2P services if they could figure out how.) By putting that beginning on Yahoo (and, doubtlessly, paying an advertising fee to Yahoo for that service) they get both -- trackability from the ad provider (if not targeting in addition) as well as built in reach (Yahoo's audience promoted to the feature, rather than an additional ad buy to drive traffic to the feature.) So you're dealing with the thinking of marketers more than anything on the above -- if there was a way for a marketing exec to check a report each day of how many Kazaa downloads had happened overnight (maybe even with the granularity of web server or ad server logs), I bet they'd be all over it.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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