Paramount Recognizes That Clips Of Movies Act As Advertising For The Movie Itself
from the what-a-concept dept
It really is amazing how little entertainment industries recognize how clips of their content online promotes the rest of their content. When people talk about scenes in TV shows or movies, it’s become quite natural to search for video of those clips to show. Such clips don’t take away from the commercial value of the movie or television show, they enhance it — giving people additional reasons to watch the full version. Yet, rather than recognizing that, you have entertainment firms like Viacom suing YouTube for $1 billion for facilitating such a free marketing tool. However, it appears that not everyone at Viacom is thinking so narrowly. Paramount Pictures, which is owned by Viacom, has now started releasing snippets from its various movies for fans to make use of within Facebook. It’s a little silly that it’s only on Facebook, but given the lawsuit against YouTube, Paramount execs probably recognized they had to stay away from YouTube. This definitely seems like a good idea, though it’s a bit amusing to have a Paramount exec say that this project could become “ad supported” at some point. Does he not realize that the clips are ads themselves?
Also, the article points out that just getting permission to get these clips online is quite difficult, and other studios probably won’t follow. A big part of the problem? All the different people who have to give their permission, thanks to ridiculous royalty policies, like the one the TV/movie writer’s guild fought for. In other words, just as we predicted, the agreement cutting the writers in on online royalties is making it more difficult for the studios to adapt to the web. When everyone has to give approval and get a cut, you get innovation by committee — and that rarely works. You almost always get someone who will veto the effort. In fact, it’s rather impressive that Paramount was able to get any movie clips up at all.
Filed Under: advertising, movies, promotions. clips, youtube
Companies: paramount, viacom
Comments on “Paramount Recognizes That Clips Of Movies Act As Advertising For The Movie Itself”
About Time.
Cooking up some inital thoughts
I came across the VooZoo site late last week and found it interesting and encouraging!
However, I imagine that it must cost at least 10x more to make-build that VooZoo site than it would be to just settle and get cozy with Larry, Serge, and Eric. Oh well.
If you keep this up, you may get a Technical Emmy Award. 🙂
“Does he not realize that the clips are ads themselves?”
That seems to be the fundamental problem in all of this — movies, music, books. Those are and ever have been products; that’s the stuff you sell. Getting them out of that mindset is no simple task.
Releasing Snippets
Gosh and a long time ago I thought they started calling them trailers and showing them on TV to get people interested in going to see the movies!! How silly am I???
I'm confused.
So short clips of movies on you tube are bad, but when their on a DVD it’s so important that I see them they disable the skip button…
Idiots.
Studios pay ridiculous amounts of money to get movies advertised on TV, but take those same ads and distribute them and the same studios will sue to stop it. How messed up is that.
Advertising should be free from the normal copyright constraints as long as no money is being made and the ad itself isn’t changed.
Re: Re:
Well, you answer your own question right there, I think: as long as no money is being made. That’s kind of a dumb qualification to add, I think. Someone somewhere is making money somehow, even if it’s just from adviews. Even if it’s the trailers that are bringing traffic to your site, should you still have to pay for giving free advertyising to the movies?
When there’s money on the table, everyone will try to find a reason why they should get some of it.
Same old, same old...
I forget the name, but there was a site back in the 90s that consisted of trailers. People would submit the movie trailers, others would rate them and anyone could watch them. Guess what the studios did? Yep, they shut them down.
Trailers are just collections of movie footage assembled in a way that the marketing men think will entice people into paying for the full product. Yet, somehow, a 3rd party putting this same footage online was “stealing”.
10 years later, the mindset’s still there. I could understand to a degree if the full movies were being streamed. But they’re not, just the adverts. If somebody from one of the studios could explain to me how a set of footage distributed by a studio is advertising, but another set of footage distributed by a 3rd party is causing a loss, I’d like to hear it.
Unfortunately, this is just an example of the movie studios following their music industry partners into an early grave. Hopefully they’ll realise this before it’s too late.
Re: Same old, same old...
“If somebody from one of the studios could explain to me how a set of footage distributed by a studio is advertising, but another set of footage distributed by a 3rd party is causing a loss, I’d like to hear it.”
It’s quite simple, it’s called extreme greed. The studio wants the 3rd party advertisers to ** PAY ** the studio for the privilege of offering them free advertising.
blinkBox offers clips from Paramount - but Warner,
Hi, in response to Mike Masnick’s article on VooZoo, I thought it worth bringing blinkBox to your attention.
blinkBox has successfully formed studio partnerships with Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Aardman Animations and Discovery Networks UK among others. Additional recent content partnerships include those with Raindance and X-Treme Video.
The Internet is completely changing the way films can be marketed as it provides a unique opportunity to create real time dialogue between the producers of the film, the audience and amongst the audience themselves. By empowering people to participate and evolve the brand of the film, the net result is a far stronger franchise. Active encouragement and reward of contribution gives people a tangible stake in the success of a movie and significantly enhances advocacy to build buzz and awareness.
blinkBox is an internet service that combines social networking and retailing in one hit. blinkBox offers a range of features which allows interaction with film and TV content. Consumers can play with the content by clipping a scene, adding a message and sending it to a friend’s mobile or PC as a “blink”, and also buy, rent and watch film and TV shows. Blinks are proving to be a popular form of communication and users can create blinks from a catalogue of over 1,000 film and TV programmes from the likes of Scarface, Harry Potter and The Big Lebowski.
If you’d like more information, please let me know.
Thanks
Clare