Sample Book Chapters
Chapter 3 - Paid Advertising
Chapter extracts in this section of the website amount to 4,000 words distilled from 110,000 words in the print book.
As a rule, films don’t recover from failed theatrical openings, and so ad campaigns usually are framed in terms of the release launch, which is the two weeks period leading in to opening weekend and first week. At the high end for the top tier of major-studio films, this generally involves $20 to $50 million in advertising, of which over half is deployed in the final two weeks, mainly on broadcast TV, cable TV, newspapers, outdoor billboards, magazines, radio, and new media such as the Internet.
Despite some proclamations to the contrary, new media such as the Web are no panacea so far for the movie business. Costly broadcast-network TV advertising is still the only way to reach huge audiences with speed and certainty for the critical film-premiere week. The ad-expenditure escalations have
“We are pushing for new ways to break through to audiences beyond the thirty-second television spot,” said Pamela Levine, copresident of domestic theatrical marketing at Twentieth Century Fox.
The movie sector ranks as about the fifth-largest category for paid advertising on a national basis with about the same spending as the department-store and fast-food–restaurant categories. In 2007, movie marketers spent $3.734 billion to buy advertising in the United States (see table 3.1), according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus.
New media could also be called complicated media for movie marketers, because they are multifaceted and fast evolving, unlike traditional analog media. A unique characteristic is the ability for movie marketers to establish a direct connection to moviegoers when they click links in Web ads (termed clickthroughs) or sign up for e-mail mailing lists. That’s unlike traditional analog media—such as television and magazines—that are not inherently interactive and always stood as a buffer between film distributors and moviegoers.
New media offers under one roof both directory and persuasion advertising opportunities. Directory provides specific playdate movie information—what newspapers listings did exclusively in the analog era—but in improved interactive and searchable platforms such as Web sites. New media can also deliver video film trailers and TV commercials, which are film marketers’ most persuasive advertising.
Text copyright © 2009, Robert Marich. All rights reserved. Used here with permission from SIU Press.
Table 3.1. U.S. movie-advertising spending by media, 2007
Column #1 $ million movie spending
Column #2 Movie spending as % of total
Network television $1,170 31%
Cable television $1,063 28%
Spot television $578 16%
Syndicated television $83 2%
Spanish language net TV $86 2%
Local newspaper $455 12%
National newspaper $108 3%
Nat’l Sunday supplement $2 >1%
National magazine $26 1%
Local magazine $3 >1%
Outdoor billboards $94 3%
Spot radio $60 2%
Network radio $6 >1%
Total $3,734 100% (three point seven billion dollars)
Source: Nielsen Monitor-Plus