Sample Book Chapters

Chapter 4-Tie-ins & Prod. Placement

   Chapter extracts in this section of the website amount to 4,000 words distilled from 110,000 words in the print book.
   With Hollywood’s major studios spending billions of dollars annually on release prints and advertising in the United States and Canada, there’s pressure to enlist third parties to help carry the marketing load. Thus, film distributors turn to tie-in promotions, which are cross-marketing deals in which consumer-goods companies put movies in their ads. In exchange, the consumer-goods outfits get to associate their products with films, hoping that a little Hollywood magic will rub off.
   Another type of promotion is the product placement, in which brand-name items are visible in the films themselves. Companies whose products are identifiable in films may provide some form of compensation, whether tie-in-promotion support (promoting a movie in their own advertising or putting movie promotions in stores), cash payments, and/or lots of free product/services to the film when it is in physical production.
   Promotional partners who made the commitment to Paramount/DreamWorks PG-13 action-adventure Transformers got the halo effect from a 2007 blockbuster grossing $319 million in the United States and Canada. According to the Licensing Letter, the Transformers promotions included Burger King, Pepsi’s Mountain Dew, Kraft, General Motors, eBay, Nokia, Vespa and Steve & Barry’s. Consumer-goods companies spend millions of dollars—and in some cases tens of millions of dollars—in advertising that simultaneously promotes their products and the movie.
   Such promotional tie-ins today are part of the Hollywood landscape, but the reality is that activity is off from a peak a few years earlier. Consumer-goods marketers came to dislike the unpredictable nature of films and their short lives in theaters. “Consumer companies and brands have heard a lot of movie pitches over the years,” said Terence Keegan, executive editor of newsletter Entertainment Marketing Letter. “The phrase you hear over and over from them is that the film property has to ‘fit the brand’ for a promotion to make sense.”
   Movies compete for promo dollars against television programs, whose tie-ins are on the upswing. TV shows are suitable for real-time contests where viewers vote via mobile-phone e-mail SMS and on the Internet. Beverage giant Coca-Cola reportedly paid $20 million to tie up with Fox’s reality-TV series American Idol, getting drink cups with its red logo placed on the desks.
 
Text copyright © 2009, Robert Marich. All rights reserved.
 

Used here with permission from SIU Press.

Table 4.2. Entertainment marketers’ tactics in media promotions, 2007

Tactic/Usage
E-mail                                        85%
Event marketing                       75%
Blogs                                         64%
Social networking Web sites     62%
Viral                                           59%
User-generated content           53%
Mobile-phone text messaging   51%
Internet service providers (e.g., AOL, MSN, Yahoo!) 49%
Internet search optimization     47%
Street teams                             47%
Fan-generated Web sites         45%
Internet paid search                 45%
Direct mail                                 43%
Podcasts                                   43%
Mobile phone audio and video  40%
Out-of-home media                   38%
Message boards                       36%
Video-on-demand                     30%
Avatars                                     15%
TiVo–DVR showcases                11%
Source: The Entertainment Marketing Letter, © 2007 EPM Communications, Inc., www.epmcom.com