As we move into the holiday season, one of the biggest groups to bump up their advertising levels - especially on TV - is the movie industry. Starting on Thanksgiving and going all the way through the New Years college football bowl games and into the Super Bowl, a great many of next summer's blockbusters will be getting a lot of airtime. Some of the big ones I would expect to see are spots for Superman Returns, Mission Impossible 3, The DaVinci Code, and X-Men 3. They all have huge budgets, are either sequels or adaptations and feature top-level stars so they all have a lot (money and ego) riding on their success. So the marketers for these flicks are all going to be salivating at the opportunity to buy commercial time during football games, parades or other events.
And all of it will be money just thrown out the window. More after the jump.
What these movies also have in common is a built-in audience. Readers of The DaVinci Code will gravitate toward the movie. Fans of the first two Mission Impossible movies will seek out the third installment (as well as people wanting to see if Tom Cruise has a seen where he jumps up and down on a couch). And comic book lovers will see the other two out of contractual obligations. These movies will also be the subject of dozens - if not hundreds - of posts on sites like Cinematical and covers or at least feature stories in both entertainment magazines like Entertainment Weekly and even news weeklies such as Time.
That means subscribers, readers and passers-by will all be exposed to these movies and there is absolutely no way they could NOT know they're coming out. When they know the movie is coming out they will, if they're interested, seek out information on where and when it's playing. They do not - repeat, do not - need to see a commercial for it. Buying commercial time for a major studio release such as these is the equivalent of running a train through someone's house and then handing them a sign saying that a train just ran through their house. It's pointless and superfluous. There's no possible way you can increase awareness or spur action by running a commercial for something someone already knows about and that just contains an opening date.
And yet television will be part of the marketing plan for these and other tentpole releases because it's the way things are done. A certain dollar amount has to be figured into every budget for TV because somebody thinks that the people watching the Rose Bowl will be so completely blown away by a commercial that they'll jump from their seats and order tickets.
The fact that so much of this is focused on opening weekend is another problem. Once a movie opens it's TV advertising drops sharply. That's because everyone wants to claim the "biggest opening ever for____" title for that month/weekend/seaon. Then box office numbers drop at the same time as ad placement. But what if more advertising were to take place two or three weeks after the movie opens? Wouldn't that help spread out the box office, increase revenue and keep movies higher up in the public's mind? Instead the studios spend millions of dollars with the goal of prompting action on one weekend when that might not be the most convenient time for some people to see any movie, much less that one. That's not very Long Tail friendly it's even less so to movies that deserve time to find an audience.
