Dear John, If Only You’d Told Your Story, We Might Have Come

It probably isn’t a surprise to anyone that JOHN CARTER opened so poorly at just over $30 million.  Disney marketers can take some solace from the markets outside of the US, where the take was around $70 million with the biggest opening ever in Russia.  The shame is that it probably didn’t have to be that bad.  Because there were so many challenges inserted by the marketing team themselves, they lost sight of the story.  If they had focused more on that, perhaps more people might have come to see it.

I can understand their reported concern about mentioning Mars in the title due to some concerns – perhaps unfounded – about people’s perceptions of titles with Mars in it.  But the Mars comps I was hearing were kid’s animated titles – not epic ones like this?  And, with the change to a name like John Carter, isn’t it a no-brainer that you would/should focus everything on conveying who he is?  Even with the fan-made trailer that was better than anything the marketing team put out doesn’t really provide any emotional connection to the character.  It does provide context of where he’s from and, possibly, how he got there, but not much more.

From my understanding, Disney was floundering with how to promote it and became wishy-washy about placement and focus and even relied more on lamenting its qualities.  I don’t buy that hinging a huge picture on a less-recognizable name or less-known source is what the main problem was. In some markets, the blame game had already begun, leaving me to shake my head at the larger international numbers. The marketing seemed to become a grabbing of straws – do we go after kids and show the dog-looking character?  Do we go after the action fan and show battle sequences?  Do we post humongous billboards with battle scenes and retro B-movie design motif or humongous billboard with a four-armed alien amidst an entirely different design motif?

Amidst all of that, there was still nothing about John Carter, the character- or anything that people cared about.  During the same opening weekend, a small film opened with very direct marketing to gain $7 million at the box office.  SILENT HOUSE didn’t hide what it was and went after that crowd with a vengeance.  They’ve got to be pretty happy with the opening weekend return.  Did Disney think they had an epic, so therefore they just needed to be big and hammer at no-one in particular? If you’re going to be sci-fi, tell a sci-fi story.  If you’re going to be an otherworldly fish-out-of-the-water love story, tell it. Paralysis is not an option for storytelling and maybe the testing and second-guessing internally led to that paralysis here.

The books by Edgar Rice Burroughs a century ago were the forefront and inspiration of so many of our beloved stories – from STAR WARS to AVATAR and more. It is truly sad that the story so many storytellers derived their stories from could do no better than seem like a derivative of all those who came after it.  The campaign tried to do everything but tell its own story and it will have nothing to show for it other than the piling on about what the marketing group did or didn’t do – and that isn’t good for anybody in the industry. Just tell the damn story…

The Challenge Of Engaging The Digital Wow Factor

I’ve been guilty of it, too.  Especially in entertainment. There is such a hope to  emulate through online creative what happens in the move you are promoting. No matter how much I want that robotic thingy to destroy the publisher’s page or that character to fly from the leaderboard unit to the MPU, it’s just not that simple. The work done for the movies is infinitely more intense than what the marketing time or budgets will allow. We are so used to seeing amazing effects that even the casual viewer takes for granted what goes into the building of the polished product. Too often, I have had a vendor create something phenomenal – where they seemed to have pulled much more than a rabbit out of their hat – and either senior management, clients or awards judges see something done so flawlessly that they don’t appreciate what actually went into it.  Sadly, the lack of appreciation for these things cause budgets to be cut and the amount of kick-ass executions are minimized.

There’s more than budgets in play here. There’s the limited time or access to assets that cause marketers to shoot for the easiest solution.  In the case of entertainment, I feel that the goal should be to envelop the audience/user in the narrative so that they are emotionally engaged.  With the opportunity to do something special – like I was able to do with PREDATORS and AVATAR, you’re able to effectively jump off the screen.  Lately, its become much more about showing video only – and even more limiting, it is often just a matter of placing TV spots online. There’s such a greater opportunity to engage users differently online that re-purposing television or even theatrical spots does not always make the most sense.

As video ads are huge and only getting larger – with Forrester predicting that video ad spends will nearly triple (from 2B in 2011 to 5.4B in 2016) – perhaps this is the time to develop shortcuts or platforms further to enable cost-effective interactive advertising executions.  I’m not talking about supplanting video, but augmenting it.

If you take a look at this video from ILM about the making of TRANSFORMERS: DARK OF THE MOON, you can get a great sense of what goes into the making of even short segments of effects.  Over the years, it has gotten easier to make things look real and it has become more expected by the audience.

Over time, the development of applications to simulate what goes on in movies will be easier.  While the barrier to production assets will probably still be a pain – due to political reasons – t he time required to execute will shorten and we’ll be able to fit more into computers, mobile devices and TVs to really enable marketers to reach out and grab the audience. That is, as long as we don’t give up on those types of executions while we lean on video ad serving to carry the load.

It used to be that we had to limit our banner sizes to about 12KB and now publishers allow much more than that.  The ways in which online ads load are more optimized and will continue to be so. I can only dream that all nations will have the bandwidth that Korea has (many of their publishers allow for initial load of 400KB or higher for a banner) but we should still be developing towards that and finding the cost and time cutting solutions that can take advantage of that.

We certainly don’t see as many major takeovers for entertainment as we might have 12-18 months ago – they are more often page overlays with a video window. But, as we move further away from driving traffic to anchor sites and deeper into reaching fragmented viewership by bringing the message fully to them, there will need to be a resurgence in those kick-ass, grab you by the collar executions. 

With further development, fully interactive and engaging media will become more of the norm and people will end up understand less about how much really goes into the magic of pulling a rabbit out of the hat. All in, we’ll have to re-establish what makes a campaign because its not just about video, but engagement.

Who Should Studios Listen To For The Clue?

Reused from THR -- Jochen Siegle/MomentMedia

Fox Filmed Entertainment’s co-chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos wrote a piece for the Hollywood Reporter remembering his relationship with Steve Jobs.  It certainly is a nice and interesting read, but the element that struck me was the favor Jobs’ asked for in their last conversation.  The concern Jobs conveys about the film industry learning from the music industry’s downfall was something we’ve discussed a lot amongst friends and associates – with the concern that those in power either weren’t paying attention, or worse, just didn’t have a solution or a clue.  In the excerpt of Jim and Steve’s last conversation below, it shows that at least someone in power has engaged openly with the concern:

I last spoke to Steve a few weeks ago when he called a couple of days after he had resigned from Apple. I had sent him an e-mail congratulating him for finally quitting his day job. He sounded frail but was still energetic and had lots of new ideas and plans. We talked for a while about politics, music, our families and, of course, business. At one point, he said: “Hey, do me a favor, will you? Don’t let what happened to the music business happen to yours — keep coming up with better ways to provide people with your content.”

Now it is up to those in power to actually take the necessary steps to make this happen.  We may never know why they have been so slow to aggressively grasp this concept until now.  It certainly seems within the corporate walls that there is true trepidation to take any steps to make smart moves in this direction.  Yes, there have been some solutions offered relating to the technology – Blu-ray and 3D – but even those are standing on its ear when looking at the 21 million illegal downloads BitTorrent is claiming for AVATAR last year.  Digital Copy is also a technology product that helps to stem the tide, but all of these don’t really respond to the changing tastes in users. Instead, they attempt to shape what the user does and that just doesn’t seem to work.  Perhaps the industry should be taking a large course in Judo – where the key is to effectively leverage the oncoming force of the attacker to reach your hoped-for outcome rather than attack full force in the hopes of changing the attacker’s direction.  Of course, the public is not attacking the film industry, but some of the things the film industry – not just the studios, but exhibitors, distributors, marketers, talent, etc. are all responsible for – could be doing are not be done.  They are certainly not taking enough meaningful trials and changes to help consumers more easily get good content in growing ways or to grow the base beyond the declining numbers they are seeing – at least in Home Entertainment.

Which leaves us at Gianopolus’ last statement.  By reading it, it gives hope that the heads of the industry will not be as stubborn as the leaders of the music industry when change happened the way consumers wanted it – almost unilaterally.

We all owe it to Steve to do that. We’ll just miss him telling us how.

Well, you’ve got many consumers looking for someone to help guide them to the best content and a bunch of talent within your walls capable of telling you how to do just that.  Perhaps they can be allowed to “tell us how…”

Completing The Circle On OOH Digital

TNT is using a Digital Out-Of-Home execution in NYC to promote the upcoming season of “Rizzoli and Isles.”  From its description, it seems like it could be a fun interaction that uses cool technology like NFC (Near Field Communications), but I have not been able to experience its execution first-hand.  It’s too bad they didn’t look to emulate at least parts of the experience online.  When I went to check out the show’s official site, I could not find an online version of the game experience, which is too bad. I also couldn’t see any images people had taken after completing the task, where they could insert themselves in the image with the cast members. Again, the lack of a clear extension online to those who could not walk by the storefront was disappointing.

There could have been so many reasons why the experiences on the street and online were not tied together in some way: different departments executing without enough communication between them; lacking ability of OOH vendor to create an online-friendly version; the OOH execution is not as it reads; or, a multitude of other reasons. Having not worked on this, it would be unfair for me to pass judgement on what happened and the vendor, Pearl Media, has a good track record.

Its happened many times before – by many companies – for many of the reasons mentioned above.  For all of the work that went into the AVATAR home entertainment campaign, we weren’t able to connect the face morphing experience at The Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles with our online extensions – partially due to technology issues and more to do with timing and communication between our digital group and the events team that executed the great OOH experience.  In both of these instances, how hard would it have been to enable some type of stream or gallery of photos in an easily sharable online location.

What seemed like second-nature and was so successful for The Simpsons Movie campaign – by way of the simple avatars people could create on the site – has proven over the years to be beyond successful as people were sharing those images everywhere (IM icons, printed postings on cubicles, emailed, etc.) and it is still exciting to see those avatars still posted in cubicles when I visit some clients’ offices. But, even with that, there was a competing Simpsons avatar program that the promotions team set up separately.  That one had many technical difficulties and was not as successful as the one we did on the site, but it was a shame that the lack of communication and double resources were expended on the same product without benefiting each other.

Proper foresight, strategy and planning would have helped to bridge the gap in these instances and, hopefully, that knowledge, strategy and foresight will help lead to more integrated instances as these types of executions continue to show up in more campaigns.  As technology is getting better and easier to integrate, there aren’t excuses for not leveraging executions across all available platforms.

iMedia Entertainment Summit Musings

At the iMedia Entertainment Marketing Summit today and here’s some of the interesting tidbits…

Brad Berens kicking things off again this year with the state of the industry. As always, compared to 30 years ago, the share numbers are low, so it will be interesting to see what he proposes as an upside. He’s proposing how Internet is the connecting piece to be able to drive the behavior we want…

Carol Kruse of ESPN is next…
All about tapping into the passion. Sports has it and even the larger brands like Coke drive their own passion, but others, like CPG, can get some of that by association. In the US, 90 percent are sports fans. With all the forms of distribution, it’s easier to be a fan, but it’s never been harder for us to reach them… It’s all about the Brand promise – not just a logo.

Social media is like a puppy. Everyone loves a puppy, but what happens when they become a dog – it’s a pain. Goes from exuberance to painful. Take it down if it’s too much of a hassle. Winnow outlets down to what can be fed effectively. ESPN runs their social properties under the guidelines of Relate, Empower and Reward. Engagement levels are amazingly high. Twitter outlets focus on real-time marketing and highlighting studio talent – who need guidelines as they represent the brand. All of this is with rules and guidelines. It was not immediately accepted, but it is now and both that and sharing wins and losses are integral to success.

It’s great that ESPN works off the adage that the fans own their brand. It was a challenge to get senior management to relinquish control, but once the brand is in the public it explodes. The one caveat is that crisis management in place so that there could be a response if something bad arises.

CASE STUDIES MOSAIC

Online Video and Tablets —
Karin Timpone from Disney focusing on second screen – Grey’s Anatomy and Oscars sync app were featured. Nearly 40% of Internet enabled homes have simultaneous usage each week. 40% of online time while watching shows. 70% of iPad users watch TV content on their tablet.

It’s so frustrating to see this presentation when the FoxPop app beat it to market by 9 months, but didn’t receive the same promotional push.

The Oscar app reel looked good, but the live latency was lacking when it was live. With 1.5MM views, it’s a cool number, but the actual technology needs to catch up.

Looking to increase social connection, storytelling and further integrating marketing messaging.

One Metric to Rule Them All —
Measuring the impact of multiple-screen advertising exposure on consumer behavior was the main talking point for Anant Mathur of Starcom Mediavest and Joan Fitzgerald of comScore. The challenge is assigning full responsibility to any one element in the multiple format campaigns. Ultimately, it’s about the overall impact. But you are able to track if you understand your consumers and how they use media.

Is using both TV and Internet, is it 1+1=2 or 1+1=2X? What is the banner equivalent to 30 second spots? For exposure of both TV and Internet, the probability of visiting the website increased by 62% within a 3 day window as opposed to 10 and 20 percents respectively for TV and Internet. 5 Internet impressions equaled 1 TV only exposure in the one case study. With both, just 1 of each type, the numbers were much higher.

They need to measure types of digital exposure to compare creatives and other executions to better measure effectiveness. Just like all spots are not equal, neither are online media executions.

AR
Scott Wellwood of Total Immersion talked about the future of augmented reality. In simplest form, it is the merging of virtual and actual in real-time.

He showed an example from AVATAR and, as usual, the spot was much more than what was ever actually executed.

AR is meant to augment and not immerse. It’s not about taking you out of your world.

Three examples given were Discovery – pointing at an image OOH, Social Engagement – more location based at certain times that is effectively like a flash mob, Enhancement – augmenting viewed content as an overlay.

Gaming
Adam Davis of Horizon discussed the work for History Channel – History Goes 360
The case study was aiming to make the program the biggest cable event of all time. The video was weird as it showed us nothing about digital. We still haven’t heard what the product was and we are 5 minutes in. 7 minutes and still no mention of the game. Still nothing more than basic strategy.

Finally, the product. And it is a waste of time. It was about a whole campaign that has been seen before with early seeding, latter interaction with polls and quizzes and then broad media leading to the premiere of the series.

It always seems that the least relevant or engaging presentation runs over their time slot the most…

Smart Poster
Dougal Strachan of Fox Theatrical Marketing spoke about NFC – near field communication – and their campaign for X-MEN: FIRST CLASS. They had a great program incorporating OOH in London

Using a shortwave communication by touching your phone to another phone or touching a .05 cent cost NFC chip.

It was a good return, but network connectivity was inconsistent, NFC reader strength varies by manufacturer, the way the poster is hung affects performance and consumer awareness are challenges that will be hopefully smoothed out.

As more financial transactions use this technology, it will be more widespread. The belief is that a third of all transactions will be done via NFC in 12 months. So, the use will become wider and simpler to get the interaction out to more people as a result.

VISIONARY AWARD
Bettina Sherick was awarded this the Visionary Marketer Award at lunch. Besides the fact that she absolutely deserved it – engaging the creation of systems and standards that still guide entertainment marketing globally for all studios – her gracious and eloquent acceptance of the award hit the spot perfectly. Bettina possesses a humility that is not always found in the industry and her tipping of the hat that everyone in then room was visionary meant a lot. Having known her and working closely with her since she began as head of Fox International Home Entertainment Digital Marketing, it was truly gratifying to see her get her due with this award.

SOCIAL MEDIA SESSION
I missed the “Social Media & Entertainment: Obstacles, Opportunities & More” session by Don Buckley of Showtime, Katy Madati of Facebook and Sarah Pass of CAA. But, I heard it was good and covered the basics that we all know…

AGENCY SHOOTOUT
In an annual event that’s either invigorating or frustrating. It is an opportunity for agencies to pitch on a product and really show your skills to a lot of people. In any case, it really shows a wide range of capabilities. Some are strong and some are not.

In this case, Damian Hagger of 6 String nailed it. He came in with the entire campaign for the fictional Tim Burton film version of WIZARD OF OZ that was complete, well thought out and expressed their detailed knowledge of the market.

What tripped Damian up a bit was the first question about cost. His answer was that it depended on the client, but it did not deal with the RFP figure of 50K and 150K campaigns. It was splashy and complete, but if their campaign would cost exponentially more, is it a fair game?

Ultimately, 6 String presented the most realistic pitch where you’ve got to present a lot in the big picture because it becomes about the odds and averages of actually receiving a green-light on any of the components.

We’ll see what the judges say…

It was 6 String by a landslide – and then we all went on to drink at the reception.

Overall, the event was another strong one.  The sessions were consistently good and the shootout was entertaining.  The speakers, for the most part, were all on-point and it was great to connect and reconnect with a bunch of friends and colleagues from throughout the entertainment industry.