A continued theme in my readings and postings (here and here):
“The amount of video consumed on TV has dropped 5% among consumers who actively stream and download content…Meanwhile, movie theater consumption fell 2% while personal computer viewing grew 8%. One-in-five hours watching video is now done online.”
See Brandweek article for more detail.
Most moviegoers agree that the best movie-watching experience is on a big screen, but more and more movies are available online for viewing on our much smaller computer screens. Netflix is quickly becoming a leader in this service by offering the ability to stream movies to a Windows PC as part of consumers’ subscriptions. And, now they are offering a device that sends those movies–streaming–to your big screen TVs: the Roku Netflix Player. For our “I want instant gratification” society, this is a great service, but the quality is reportedly still not great:
According to an article in BusinessWeek–”The Roku is a small box that superficially resembles products such as Apple TV or Vudu. But while the setup is similar, the operation is completely different. Other services download the content to a hard drive for playback; Netflix is pure streaming. The quality is not as good as Apple TV or Vudu, but it’s about equal to standard-definition digital TV. Making it work smoothly requires an Internet connection that consistently delivers at least 2 megabits per second.”
The services out there for movies on-demand at home are getting better and less expensive, but you still can’t beat the experience of watching a movie on a big screen. And free is best of all. If you live in Little Rock, be sure to check out Movies in the Park this summer. Free outdoor movies–shown on the big screen–every Wednesday night for eight weeks starting June 4th with E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Bring friends along with the beverages and snacks of your choice and hang out under the stars for an evening. It is a fantastic movie experience.
Here is the Movies in the Park schedule for the summer:
June 04, 2008 E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
June 11, 2008 Rocky
June 18, 2008 Happy Feet
June 25, 2008 Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
July 02, 2008 Notting Hill
July 09, 2008 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
July 16, 2008 Casino Royale
July 23, 2008 The Wizard of Oz
More confirmation that the marketing efforts for the Dark Knight will continue as planned, reported in BrandWeek:
“Promotional partners are standing by their programs and reportedly won’t need to scrap any related marketing materials. The reason: they did not focus on the ghoulish Joker character, instead preferring to center their campaigns on the hero, Batman.
“That’s been the norm for brand/movie tie-ins for years, with corporate partners choosing not to align too closely with the bad guys.”
I saw Juno three times. It was a great, heart-warming movie–obviously, I loved it. When you see a movie that many times over a two-week period, you start noticing details that could have been missed. My thoughts today turned to Tic Tacs. Paulie Bleeker, the boy who knocks up Juno, had one vice according to Juno: orange Tic Tacs. Throughout the movie he is eating them and at one point Juno stuffs his mailbox full of them. I was craving orange Tic Tacs after the third viewing and I couldn’t tell you the last time I even thought about Tic Tacs.
Did the Tic Tac brand pay for that placement? Are they doing anything to leverage that placement now? I haven’t seen anything, but they should.
Today I read about a Tic Tac sampling event that encourages consumers to mix music tracks using the sound of Tic Tacs clanging around in their iconic box. The target for this promotion is 18-24 year olds. While I get that they are trying to connect music–which is important to this audience–to the Tic Tac brand, it just seems lame after witnessing the connection that Paulie Bleeker and Juno had to Tic Tacs. That is what Tic Tacs should be using to connect to this audience: Juno. Why aren’t they leveraging that product placement?
In BusinessWeek: “They may say they hate chick flicks, but men can enjoy stories about sacrifice, love, and empowerment, a new study shows. The key, say three marketing professors in February’s Journal of Consumer Research, is keeping the story unreal. The researchers had undergrads read adaptations of poignant stories by O. Henry and others, presenting them as TV scripts. Males showed more empathy and involvement when told the tales weren’t true. Men ‘need to know beyond a doubt that it’s fiction,’ says Jennifer Argo of the University of Alberta School of Business, one of the study’s authors. Exiting reality, she says, ‘is an excuse to relax gender stereotypes’–and emote. Women preferred true stories. The study’s advice to entertainment marketers: Emphasizing that a weepie is fictional may bring in more males. And get a few real men to cry.”
The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article in yesterday’s issue: Will Marketing Change After Star’s Death? The article does a nice job of summing up the viral campaign used to promote the next Batman installment, The Dark Knight. The studio used Health Ledger’s “playful but psychotic” The Joker character as the star of the viral campaign, despite the fact that Christian Bale returns as the title character. And, “Mr. Ledger isn’t featured just in the online campaign. The movie’s current poster includes a ghostly and haunting image of Mr. Ledger in his Joker getup, with the tag line ‘Why So Serious?’ scrawled in red.”
The question is, with the untimely death of the movie’s featured star/character, will the studio continue this successful viral initiative? The studio hasn’t responded to the status of the film or marketing campaign, they have simply released a statement expressing its condolences on Mr. Ledger’s death. A source quoted by the Journal recommends that “the best that could happen is that all this marketing stuff just goes on and the move and the campaign don’t turn into some kind of grave marker.”
All of Ledger’s fans will just have to wait and see, but the viral campaign has certainly intrigued me into anxiously awaiting the film’s release this summer.