American Film Market 2011 conference: unofficial notes
Nov 8, 2011 9 AM: Distribution Conference notes part 2, "Monetizing New Global Platforms"
Notes by B. Hahne
The original blog location of these notes is: http://2011afm.blogspot.com
This is day 5 of a 5-day series.
Clarifications or pithy comments by the note-taker will generally appear in [square brackets like this].
These notes are copyright (c) 2011 by Bruce Hahne. Noncommercial, nonprofit redistribution and/or pointing people to the blog is permitted and encouraged.
Disclaimers: "Free notes, you get what you pay for!" There notes are a summary, not a transcript, and represent my best effort to capture the panel discussion plus Q&A. They also probably contain errors. I'm not in the film industry, nor am I affiliated with AFM / American Film Market or with any of the firms associated with the panelists.
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Moderator: Brad Kembel, Executive VP for International Distribution, Summit Entertainment.
Panel:
- Erik Brannon, Analyst, IHS, Screendigest
- Dan Cohen, Executive VP for Pay TV and Interactive Media for Disney/ABC Domestic TV
- Elisabeth Costa de Beauregard Rose, Executive VP for International Sales, Lakeshore Entertainment
- Jon Ferro, SVP for Program Sales, EntertainmentOne
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Intros:
Brad: we're the studio that does Twilight.
Dan: In English, I license the TV shows that ABC makes and some of Disney's content for subscription, digital, etc.
Elis: We finance and produce films.
Jon: Licensing TV rights.
Brad: This panel is about digital future, or maybe it's the "digital now" - mostly VOD here. Complicated new business model and the marketplace is a mess. We've asked Erik to give us a 10-minute primer.
Erik:
- IPTV: TV content delivered through the internet
- Pay TV on demand aka VOD: transactional rental of movies via closed networks
- EST, electronic sellthru: sales via open internet [I think he means like buying a digital download - he doesn't mean buying a DVD online.]
- Digital rental: rental via open internet e.g. Xbox and Amazon
- Digital subscription: CinemaNow, StarzPlay, uses open internet
"Pipelines": a content distribution method including IPTV or cable or open internet or satellite.
"Platforms": device-specific reference such as an ipad or PC or IPTV.
"Cloud-based": like UltraViolet: content you purchased delivered any time to any device of yours.
We predict $48B consumer spend on home video in 2011. 2007 was $54.6B. So slight declines, but not the end of the industry. Physical disc sales and rentals will remain predominant form of film consumption in near future.
There are challenges everywhere:
- Physical: pricing and piracy
- PayTV and VOD: pricing and sticker shock
- Internet-based solutions: interoperability
"Redbox society": consumers expect to be able to rent for very low price, very close to home.
Internet solutions not compatible with each other, e.g. iTunes content can't play on your TV unless you have an Apple TV. [Yes, Apple does closed ecosystems buddy, that's how they play, it sucks.]
Physical: 83% of all home video transactions in 2011.
All electronic transactions growing to 25% by 2015.
iTunes, Xbox, and PS3 stores dominate for internet sales.
Pricing is hindering internet and payTV pipelines.
Sticker shock: cost to rent an SD title is $5 on your pay TV system. So 4 titles is $20.
Internet EST: interoperability is really curtailing EST.
South Korea: Government mandated broadband upgrades for the whole country, and people shifted away from buying HD content (disks), now they pirate it. [Shifting towards EST here?]
Moving towards:
- Less sellthru, more rental.
- Less total revenue for the business. We see 4% declines YoY.
- More electronic, less physical
Social media can offer a stopgap measure.
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Brad: Streaming / VOD, please comment.
Jon: Netflix has proved to be a good rerelase platform for old content. Library revenue matters for a studio - it's an underlying economic engine. The CW did a deal with Netflix. At the highest level, maybe this is the same thing as the consumer going to the video store. With video store you'd often rent 3 titles and only watch one. With VOD you make the buy decision on the spot, you don't rent 3 titles like that. And people can also walk away from the VOD web page, but they don't usually walk away from the bricks-and-mortar store emptyhanded.
Dan: VOD used to be pay-per-view and started at a fixed time. VOD you can watch any time + rewind. For our catalog, we always keep it out there where people can rent it via VOD. I do all digital licensing for Disney movies, i.e. iTunes downloads. We've had more people get copies via Digital Copy / Digital Download (where you buy the DVD in the store and it comes with a coupon for digital copy) than people who are using EST. Netflix has changed the TV landscape in the past few years - they're a new platform for us.
Dan: I think the pie is growing, that Erik's opening remarks aren't right. Shift from ownership to rental, shift from physical to digital. VOD is a big growth business for us. But the VOD isn't offsetting loss of DVD sales, so for movies it's true the pie is NOT growing. Disney sold Miramax and reduce the number of films we make, focus on big franchise movies for us.
Elis: I deal heavily with non-US, not US. Fall in DVD revenues is significant in Europe, Asia, etc. The drops are much more than in the US, which is weird since there's not a proliferation of big brand-name VOD companies. We have independent VOD players though, smaller. The revenue isn't there yet. Yes, it's an alternate form of revenue but the levels aren't there. Big impact of piracy. Korea, piracy very rampant, you're lucky if you can sell 500 to 2000 units. Maybe Disney can get 10K sales, I don't know. DVD sales decimated by piracy. The one upside of piracy is that people are learning how to download films on the internet - it builds awareness, it's training people to get used to downloading films, no more discs. Next re-education is to teach people that they need to PAY for that content. In the future, VOD has big potential.
Jon: Indy perspective is different. We have Margin Call and Trespass doing day-and-date with theatrical, price $7 to $10 on VOD, slightly higher pricepoint. Those films are changing the economic model. DVD component might not be as important. Blockbuster rental situation is changing - if Bbuster had died it would have hurt direct-to-DVD industry. VOD isn't helping direct-to-video industry much due to movie saturation, so everybody earns less per film. Margin Call and Trespass did OK due to the theatrical releases.
Dan: Re "Redbox World": the major studios have treated them differently. Warner + Universal are windowing Redbox by 28 days. Paramount + Sony did rev-share deals with Rbox. I have an out put deal with Starz and I was crying about Redbox and Overture said "we love it, we get more distribution through Rbox than through traditional means." For an indep film, Rbox might be a great thing, or a similar kiosk player in an international location. Treat them as part of the sales ecosystem for your movie.
Brad: Elis, you and I represent the high end of AFM sellers here, it's a well-understood model, we sell our own films and other people's films, foreign presales, and you use those presales to get financing to make your movie. We're removed from this new revenue since we sell to the distributors, we don't do VOD directly. This is 1st year that I'm hearing $100K+ VOD reported from our distributors, no longer $10K's, but not millions yet either.
Elis: DVD has fallen so much in many territories that VOD doesn't work as "additional" financing, we're just trying to get back to where we were. The thing with VOD is you can micro-target the customer, you know who they are. I think that in the future this approach will pull a lot of ad dollars away from traditional TV due to the ability to micro-target the customer. That's 10-15 years out, but it will take away from free TV and pay TV revenues.
Brad: US exploitation / rights management issues, please comment.
Jon: Difficult to manage these days, they're complex. Take a TV series - who has the right to put something on iTunes? Who has the right to put it on Xbox? [I think his point is that the internet is doing its thing by blurring the concept of national boundaries.] These are turning into complex negotiations because they impact the basic value of the series to the studio. We're now holding back rights, or charging more for full rights. Negotiated country by country. Rights management systems are a pain point also - there are solutions out there but they're expensive.
Dan: There's also clearance issues. Sometimes your music isn't cleared for putting the stuff on the internet. We spend a lot of time on rights + clearances. Disney sold the Miramax library earlier this year -- some of that is governed by a Starz output deal from 1999! The buyer is starting to distribute through Lions Gate but there are there governing rules from 1999 when most of the technology didn't exist. It all had to be interpreted + negotiated. And Netflix wasn't doing pay TV back when we negotiated some of these deals.
Another example: TV show airs on ABC, then it's on iTunes the next day, what do we do with Hulu, what about Hulu+, what do we do for NetFlix? Right now we don't give it to NetFlix the next day. VOD: movies are different results. Cars2: VOD same day as DVD. Pirates 4: windowed for VOD, not same-day.
Brad: What's the future of some of the big players like Google, Amazon? Amazon bought LoveFilm in the UK but didn't rebrand it.
Jon: Google + Youtube are huge but they have a lot to prove. Youtube hasn't yet proved that they're efficient at delivering audience for premium content. They're great for viral video, 20M hits on some viral thing, but not efficient at selling VOD. We're watching them closely, partnered for VOD, using them for anti-piracy, monetizing clips on Youtube, like if a user makes a clip with one of our TV shows, there's a revenue share. If one of those clips goes viral and get 10M views, we get some of the ad money. Youtube has to convince people who have been watching for free to start either watching massive amounts of ads, OR pay for the program. How do you convince a Youtube person to pay $4 to consume a product when they used to get stuff for free? That's a big jump for the consumer. Youtube has good management and good engineering, but the engineering is difficult to make its way through right now. 5 years from now they could become the equivalent of Comcast, it depends on who has the rights. If ESPN glues itself to the satellite distributors, Google probably can't get the rights. But for NFL you can watch those on your Playstation now. The cable operators are looking 10 years out and knowing it will be a big fight for the consumer dollar.
Elis: How will consumers find what they're looking for, how do they even know what they're looking for?
Jon: Netflix and Youtube aren't programmers. They're using a different algorithm. But we're reliant on "programming" for people to discover our content. Example: Comcast, we have a deal and maybe we want to be on The Barker channel. But Netflix + Youtube have been anti-program in the past -- "if you like product X then you might like product Y". If Google isn't going to promote our content then it falls to us at Reliant to market the content more ourselves, which changes the relationship to our broadcaster.
Dan: I handle VOD and e-sellthrough. Youtube has been modest in its success for me so far. They launched a small store last year and I'm OK with that. Our first movie deal was with Xbox 5 years ago. My guy came in and said "we're going to offer the movie on Xbox" and I said "huh, Xbox is a game console, say what?" Xbox has been good at the technology: you can watch it on any of their screens, and also doing good things with discovery. You're going to see some voice-activated discovery coming out soon, and Kinect. If you can speak "pirates of the Caribbean" and everything related to that movie comes up, that's great for us. Also these companies are becoming global players: iTunes, Xbox, more. So for Disney we have to coordinate a lot - my Xbox guy will want to do a deal in Japan, and that's not my territory.
Brad: Elis, can you see "rights for Google" being sold separately in the future?
Elis: Not really. I think there will be less ad revenue for TV in 10 years. For next 5-10 years we can do [legal] holdbacks. NetFlix was trying to launch in Spain but recently put that on hold due to recent NetFlix issues. This was a big hit to us, they were going to do a lot in Spain, there's no competition for pay TV and Netflix was going to compete, so our distributors were actually getting negotiating power since the monopoly was about to not be a monopoly. So once the major players go internationally there might be more leverage [for some players]. But we won't be carving out special revenues very much.
Dan: Consumer electronics companies are starting to pay attention to content now too - Samsung etc, they put NetFlix onto their TVs. But the CE firms are starting to look at their own content also. Anecdotally, I have a lot of people say "yes I have netFlix" and I say where, and they say "it's on my TV" - NetFlix has been really smart about getting their application onto all of these devices, and the CE firms are thinking "well, maybe we should have our own movie store online."
Brad: microbudget, low budget, can you sell your product directly on the internet, cut out the distributors, everybody on the panel?
Jon: Difficult to believe you can earn back your production budget by selling on the internet today, if you spend $100K to millions, we've never seen anybody make that kind of money [by selling on the internet]. iTunes doesn't want any more deals now, they want to deal with aggregators. NetFlix has been pretty good about sharing the money, but NetFlix distribution won't cover your production costs, and NetFlix is going to start pulling the money back in. People with a film need to look at all the opportunities: do you do theatrical, VOD, go directly to Comcast, something else? You need expertise. What are the Netflix windowing rules? You need somebody who knows that.
Brad: Jon + Dan created new platforms: Epix, and FearNet through Lions Gate. Please talk about complications in creating platforms etc.
Dan: We launched Disney Family Movies a few years ago. We took an opportunity to release some older titles on VOD: Dumbo, the original Alice in Wonderland. Made it available just for 1 month via Comcast VOD, and they took the top slots. So we created an SVOD (streaming VOD) service, subscription-based, monthly fee. We have to constantly market this to overcome churn, but it's revenue, it's growing. Consumers do like subscriptions - this is something that works well for NetFlix. Cable operators not good at selling transactions but they know how to sell subscriptions.
Jon: FearNet was for horror films, but not the greatest advertising platform obviously. Did a partnership with Sony which also has a good horror library. Build an ad-supported VOD platform. We wanted dynamic ad insertion, which hasn't been available through Comcast. FearNet relaunched as a linear channel - like you break up the movie into TV chunks [and show ads like commercial breaks?]
Epix was Paramount, MGM, Lions Gate, all finding their output deals expired at the same time. Realized that they'd have more market power if they worked together.
Brad: About the "digital file owned in a cloud locker", please comment.
Dan: Will be a few years before consumers get that and can use it effectively. It's about interoperability. If I buy a DVD, I can watch that anywhere. With digital, that doesn't happen. But if I buy it digitally, I should be able to watch it anywhere - that's the goal of UltraViolet. Consumers have had storage issues, so the cloud stuff helps. Apple hasn't launched its cloud movie product yet, there are licensing issues WRT output deals that will get resolved.
Apple has dominated the E-sellthru business so far, but if it stays that way it's not good for the industry. We need more stores AND interoperability.
Brad: Why is UltraViolet attached to the sale of a physical DVD?
Dan: We're not part of UltraViolet so I can't speak for them. You could in theory put in a piece of paper with a code, but our marketing people believe that the consumer wants a physical disk - we sell "E-copies" which are just "digital copies" and we could just put in a slip of paper, but right now that's not what we do.
Dan: We do our deals nation by nation. With iTunes we have an overarching agreement on ground rules, but still negotiate territory by territory.
Jon: Amazon has done well selling books digitally, consumers do get it.
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Q&A
Q: Re windows, do we the filmmakers have anything to say about them?
Elis: If you want to be involved in the process you can, we give you your options.
Brad: But frankly you want us to do this for you.
Elis: Right, there's a lot of product out there and if you're slow, the buyers will just move on to some other product.
Q: Re social media and targeting, for independent distribution models, can that approach work?
Elis: I think so, there are fan bases on the internet. Youtube, Fbook, if you get enough views it can take off.
Brad: Yes but you have the discoverability problem, how do you drive eyeballs to your film?
Jon: There are firms starting to look at this, I haven't seen anybody succeed well, but people are looking at the question of low-cost and social media to reach niche audiences.
Elis: There are a lot of internet talk show hosts out there who have >1M subscribers each, and it's growing.
Q: I can imagine VOD displacing everything. What will that do to film budgets + distribution?
Elis: I don't think that will happen, movie theaters aren't going away, which is good since if theaters go away it hurts the industry. DVD will go away, very small in the future, like LPs.
Q: So won't that impact budgets?
Elis: Yes, maybe positive, maybe negative.
Jon: VOD has better margins.
Dan: I'm the digital guy at Disney. The physical DVD business is still enormous and will be big for at least 10 more years. So don't forget that there will be a lot of DVDs sold.
Q: Re data cap [Comcast stuff], this is impacting cloud model, what can you/we do?
[Nobody on the panel is savvy in this area.]
Dan: There's more competition today and there's a desire to sell bundles. Comcast wants to sell you a bundle including voice and internet. What you're raising is a big issue - it's not what we on the panel do, though.
Q: Re VOD, can that help short film business? Short films become more popular?
Elis: Large demand for short films over the inet - see Youtube. In TV that hasn't worked, the advertising deals haven't worked out well
Q: But could it become transactional?
Elis: Advertising. [No panel support for transactional revenue model for short film.] You can get awareness, use it for marketing.
Dan: For Tron, and I Am #4, we made the first 10 minutes for free on demand. A lot of people sampled this content and we got a lot of rental from these.
Q: How can I protect against consumers recutting my film?
Dan: We don't allow that, and in our deal with Amazon we don't allow them to allow the customer to do that. We're just barely now getting the idea that people might want to do chat around the movie.
Elis: Our agreements are that people can't air in a non-linear format. The only cutting you get is for censorship reasons.
Q: Virtual worlds, virtual environments?
Jon: You could do avatars, Sony is sort of in this space, Fbook has been seen as being a way to do this, but not taking off right now.
Q: Re piracy, how much is it impacting the bottom line and what resources are being put into defense?
Elis: Used to sell 2x or 3x as many DVDs as theatrical. DVD still OK in Australia but sales still down. Lots of distribution companies went out of business, though QwikFlix has started in AU recently.
Q: What's the safest form of protecting the content?
Elis: There isn't. There are firms that will do takedown notices for you.
Brad: There's a huge industry around this: MPAA, AFM, many players working the piracy issue. But international is UP across the board, up 20%/year overall, multiplex buildouts happening. [Really?]
Q: All this streaming - shouldn't the film industry be getting a cut of data streaming revenues? We should get a cut of the cable revenues etc.
Dan: In the early days, Comcast etc. said "why should we allow internet VOD, we have our own VOD service already, maybe we'll block that content". Thankfully better business heads prevailed, Comcast is starting to say maybe I don't care if my customer buys from iTunes.
Q: About 3D, how will that impact bandwidth issues etc?
Jon: It doubles the file size, one for each eye, it's not as bad as SD to HD transition. 3D demands a fully-engaged experience - is that how you watch movies? Most people don't watch that way, they're getting up, moving around, talking to people in the room. Sometimes 3D will be a great experience but I don't think it will become the norm.
Brad: Can stay as a novelty in theaters since the screens and gear are there. International was booming, but starting to wane now. Will probably be specialized, like Imax movies, you go pay more for a specialty experience.
Q: If you have $500K marketing budget in the US, how are you allocating for theatrical vs. VOD?
Elis: Depends on the film, the genre, the audience, the demographic. If you're going online, who is the online community.
Q: Is there a minimal spend in the VOD arena? [He really seems to mean "what does my internet advertising budget look like for a small indy film?]
Jon: I've seen success with $0 and with well under $500K.
Q: Do you envision in the future that projects will be driven by content, not by A-list stars?
Brad: No, star power will still matter.
Elis: But concepts matter, ultimately it's about the script, your foundation, the story, most important thing. You can do well even without a star, but everything else has to come together.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Tuesday: Distribution conference part 1: "Limited and Specialty Releases"
American Film Market 2011 conference: unofficial notes
Nov 8, 2011 9 AM: Distribution Conference notes part 1, "Limited and Specialty Releases"
Notes by B. Hahne
The original blog location of these notes is: http://2011afm.blogspot.com
This is day 5 of a 5-day series.
Clarifications or pithy comments by the note-taker will generally appear in [square brackets like this].
These notes are copyright (c) 2011 by Bruce Hahne. Noncommercial, nonprofit redistribution and/or pointing people to the blog is permitted and encouraged.
Disclaimers: "Free notes, you get what you pay for!" There notes are a summary, not a transcript, and represent my best effort to capture the panel discussion plus Q&A. They also probably contain errors. I'm not in the film industry, nor am I affiliated with AFM / American Film Market or with any of the firms associated with the panelists.
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Moderator: Steve Gaydos, Executive Editor, Variety, who is "stuck in traffic" as of 9:27 AM.
Panel:
David Fenkel, President, Oscilloscope Labs, NY indep film distributor.
Susan Jackson, President + Co-Founder, Freestyle Releasing
Charlotte Mickie, Executive VP, Entertainment One
Tom Quinn, Co-President of New Label, The Weinstein Company
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[Panel starts out at 9:20 AM doing self-intros since the moderator isn't here.]
David: We want to control our accounting, programming, marketing, "beginning and end of the whole distribution process for filmmakers". We also have our own DVD label. Documentaries, foreign-language films. Find films we're passionate about and then try to figure out how to make money on those.
Susan: "Service theatrical company": producers come to us with P&A money - we're like a mini-studio. Just started Freestyle Digital Media., a service, which will complement their theatrical events with VOD.
Charlotte: Entertainment One distributes in Canada, AU, UK, US. Produce and sell for TV. Manufacture DVDs in Canada. What I do is sell feature films internationally to distribution companies. Some docs. Genre films, arthouse films, larger films which have stars.
Tom: At Weinstein for 2 months. Co-president of a new label at Weinstein: multi-platform slate. Previously at Magnolia Pictures as SVP and Head of Acquisitions.
Charlotte: A filmmaker said "I'd really like people to SEE my film, can I just put it up on my website?" And I said no, you need a distributor and VOD deals. But for those of you on the panel, can you explain how the VOD thing works?
Tom: There's a misconception that VOD is magic and you just do it and money starts growing. Many VOD platforms - think of them as theater owners. What do you want from a theater owner? You want your poster out front, you want your trailer playing in the theater. You can put your film onto VOD but if nobody knows it's there, without promotion, it's amazingly invisible, nobody will find it. But if you do it correctly then you get access to 65M customers.
Charlotte: Do they need an agent?
Tom: They need to go through a gatekeeper. I do have friends who got their film onto iTunes themselves, low-cost things that cost them $50K, but it was a lot of work.
David: Lots of work to be done to exploit an iTunes release. Maybe you need college screenings or non-theatrical - get exposure elsewhere OFF of VOD and off of iTunes. If cast is low-end and you have no exposure, you don't want to just put it up on iTunes to see what happens. Invest in some sort of distribution platform.
Tom: Or name your film "Sex and Zen" like somebody did.
Susan: Still need to reach the consumer to let them know your film is available. But VOD can be more cost-effective.
[Panel moderator Steve Gaydos shows up]
Steve: Claim from a friend: "Overall business for independents is down by 75% compared to 5 years ago". Please comment.
Tom: Things have changed a lot multiple times in the past 5 years. In Magnolia our projections were off by 90% in some areas. We moved to day-and-date distribution to bring back the business. Last 10 years of box office in our space: number of films has doubled while the total number of indy films making a reasonable return had stayed flat, and while advertising costs had doubled. It wasn't working out well.
Steve: Lots of confusion about VOD numbers and what "VOD" is, even from experts. What drives VOD success?
Susan: Be earlier in the alphabet. [I.e. she means if the title starts with "A", I guess]
Tom: There can be a pop value based on title or cast, but playability does matter.
Steve: How do you define "playability"?
Tom: [People say] "I like the movie"
Susan: you can get good word of mouth on movies that are hard to market but very playable.
David: If you get your poster up on iTunes and have a strong 1-2 weeks then it feeds on itself.
Tom: Each online VOD store is different: Xbox vs. Comcast vs. etc. I agree there's not enough info, but in 2 years we'll probably have more data.
Charlotte: I have trouble finding distributors for various films that have played well at film festivals, particularly midwestern [she said "heartland"] festivals. Is VOD an opportunity here?
David: Hm, well maybe.
Steve: Is there good news in the industry?
David: In the indy business we can move faster, the studios are slower.
Tom: The independents are now taking over the space occupied by the middle, the mini-majors.
Steve: Somebody comes to you with a film that hasn't been part of a bidding war, and the film has value. What misconceptions do they bring with that film when they talk to you?
Susan: Usually it's that the cast is going to support the movie [i.e. that the cast is going to help you with publicity]. I'd say you should all put indentured servitude clauses into your contracts to make your cast help you market the movie.
Steve: Can you get word of mouth on films today?
David: Sure, but might not be theatrical. Sometimes that does happen, e.g. Black Swan.
Tom: You need to talk about age range. WOM I think of myself + my parents [older], "viral" I think a younger age range. If you can appeal to both audiences then that's where WOM and "viral" meet, e.g. Let the Right One In.
Steve: Can you only spot it in advance? I was at a midnight screening of Midnight in Paris and had a sense of WOM growing in that theater.
David: Sure we "sense" that a lot, but we're often wrong.
Steve: Are you seeing lessons from different countries as you distribute films?
Charlotte: US is far ahead of any other country we work with. VOD is nothing in Australia, very small in Europe, and in Canada there are some market restrictions about doing day-and-date. So non-US doesn't have much to say to the US side right now.
Steve: Any types of films that are doing better?
Charlotte: It's not the films that I have, but endeavor films: Formula 1 racing, boxing, ballet.
Steve: Small film doing a platform release in NY. What are the rules for a NY release?
David: We have films where we don't believe theatrical is a good idea. There are theatres in downtown NY which have cultivated their audience and if the film is a good fit then that's OK. But not always the right thing.
Susan: We have movies that we only release regionally and nobody in the "traditional" world would even know we released them - African-American, or faith-based, and we never go to NY for those. If you open in NY then you have to pay for a 4-wall which is expensive. But some of the output deals we have REQUIRE opening in NY.
Susan: If you pick up a film that's very marketable and you know that the NY Times is going to kill it in the reviews, then you don't go to NY.
Steve: What are your competitors doing that are good ideas?
Susan: Troll Hunter.
Steve: Why?
Tom: Very unique film, blockbuster in Norway, I saw it in Austin. Sold out around the world in 15 days just based on the trailer. Brought it to AFM and sold it out - Universal took a big piece. We had previously released Let the Right One In head-to-head with Twilight, which you'd think would be a stupid idea, but we know that every review of Twilight would also mention Let the Right One In. VOD and DVD don't always work out - we had a film do $5M box office and the VOD and DVD numbers are horrible.
Steve: Why is that?
Tom: Because my parents just figured out recently that you can rent DVDs via mail, and they don't understand VOD, but they know where the movie theater is.
Steve: So if your demographic is older, you put your energy where that demographic is. [duh]
Tom: And over 50% of that film's revenue was made in NY. So sometimes you go to NY for the revenue.
Susan: There are specialty movies, some do huge numbers on DVD, some do large box office.
Tom: My biggest DVD title last year was made for $50K, no stars, nobody has ever heard of it, my wife told me not to buy it because she hated it, and it addressed an audience that doesn't normally get a movie made for them.
Susan: We had one film do 4x on DVD what it did in the box office.
Charlotte: Winter's Bone, played in NY and in smaller markets.
Susan: That was a word of mouth situation.
Charlotte: How did the numbers play out?
David: $6M box office and then they got a bunch of Oscars.
Steve: How do you decide how much P&A to invest, $1M or $500K or whatever? How do you know when to "up your bet" and spend more on the marketing budget? Since these days $1M box office is considered good.
Susan: We have output deals that require certain numbers of screens and certain amounts of spend [so that sets a floor in many cases.]
Steve: OK well, are there still gamblers out there who will bet more on P&A spend?
David: We only take a small number of films for theatrical each year. Maybe 1 per quarter. At festivals our method is very simple, we look for the best film at the festival, and we hope it has a decent/known cast. We're looking for something we can get into Walmart.
Charlotte: There's still a market for westerns in the US
Susan: Yes, westerns still do well on DVD in the US. Not elsewhere, but yes in US.
Steve: Is there a consensus about what DVD sales are compared to what DVD sales used to be? Are we repeating the music industry story with album sales?
Susan: Bigger movies with names are still selling, A and A- stars.
Tom: For the smaller DVD title, that's a very dangerous business. But there's a good import genre business: Troll Hunter etc. Non-fiction smaller titles, art film, those are dying.
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Q&A
Q: I just finished a documentary, how can I contact people on the panel or people like you?
Tom: An intro is best. Or a succinct email that explains what you're doing.
David: We look at every film that goes to SxSW and Sundance.
Susan: I'm looking for very commercial films, not docs.
Q: What elements do you look for that help you to move the product?
Susan: The filmmakers partner with us in our case. We want the cast to show up [at events, showings] and do Q&A.
Q: Distribution with you folks AND the producer wanting to do self-distribution in smaller markets - can that work?
David: We don't do many split-rights deals like that. Harder for us to get behind a film when we're splitting up digital rights, or regions. If the filmmakers want to be part of the promotion process that's fine, like Buck had all these Fbook friends before the movie launched, and the filmmaker started that.
Q: I have a movie and we split the rights, international vs. domestic who is also handling VOD / online. We were warned against doing theatrical since it might screw us on TV.
Susan: That's French TV, that's your problem. It's about how likely it is that your film will want to air on French commercial TV.
Charlotte: In France they try to protect all the windows and there's a rule that says if the film is distributed theatrically in country of origin, then it MUST have a French theatrical release before it can go to French TV. Though there are some workarounds.
Susan: So it depends on your film - if unlikely to go onto French TV anyway then who cares.
Q: Most of us don't have Natalie Portman so we can't do Black Swan. For a pitch of a project, what elements do you care about?
David: We care about finished films. Most important thing is the trailer to us.
Charlotte: I do pick up scripts. I don't know how much a bunch of business analysis stuff surrounding a script will help me -- maybe for a niche demographic. But for international release I'm more concerned about the quality of the script. And I'd prefer if there's already a director on board, and I care about that director, and I care about the cast. I.e. I care about the creative elements not the business elements [at the script stage].
Q: I made a documentary and got into some boutique theaters and just signed with a NYC theater. Can I use this to talk to foreign markets now?
Charlotte: If the reason you did well in the US is US-centric then not necessarily. But it depends a lot on the movie.
Tom: If this was through Aaron Hill then you have a story right there.
Q: Re US DVDs. Filmmakers who don't get distribution, they go out on DVD, but Baker & Taylor and others won't deal with the indy filmmaker directly. They always send me to a particular aggregator, the same company, same guy at Victory Multimedia. [Nobody on the panel has heard of Victory Multimedia.] I did sign with them and I advise the audience not to. What would you recommend to indy filmmakers to get past these gatekeepers?
David: It's a tricky business. You need to choose a reputable company, like Image, DVD machines, that have relationships with Baker & Taylor etc.
Charlotte: E1 is in that business [that's her].
Q: Do US audiences like dubbed or subbed?
A: Dubbing sucks in US. For first window release, no.
Q: How often does the filmmaker bring their own P&A in deals with you?
Susan: That is my business, I'm a P&A investor.
David: We don't do that much though we're open to it.
Q: So the filmmaker doesn't have to bring that?
David: It's an advantage.
Tom: General idea is that for your $500K film, you should have $100K in that budget for P&A.
Steve: Exit strategy, is it good if the filmmaker has thought of this?
Susan: I'd be happy if the filmmaker just had some decent still photographs.
Charlotte: Or just get the deliverables right.
David: Look around the industry, unit publicity is really important yet very rare in indy film business. If you get ONE striking still photo from your film, Variety will run it.
Charlotte: About deliverables. For US vs. foreign these days you often end up making 2 different deliverables: DCP vs. HD. Expensive.
Steve: Is digital a win?
Tom: Yes, it's a win to not have to be on 35mm film. But... at festivals this makes it difficult to import 35mm - the US theaters are so upgraded that they can't play 35mm film now.
Susan: You have to decide if you're going to cut a 35mm version of the trailer, that's very expensive.
Steve: General advice is if you have any question or budget issues about your deliverables, you have a problem.
Susan: Music clearance is also a killer.
Q: Films successful in a certain market like W. Africa, has nothing to offer in the US, is that of interest to you on the panel?
Tom: That can be interesting to me, if it was very successful in its country of origin, but at the end of the day we do the same US analysis.
Q: Do you offer up-front fees when acquiring?
Tom: Yes.
David: About this, "Welcome to the Sticks" did very well in France, beat Titanic. IFC bought it but never released it in the US.
Tom: Why not?
Steve: It's really local. Local success. A lot of European filmmakers think "my film did really well in Holland, so now I'm going to get a lot of money!" and they're wrong.
David: We get pitched a lot of documentaries and my pet peeve is the pitch "there are 10M wrestlers in the US, if we get 1% of that market we'll make all this money!"
Tom: Right, that formulaic assumption. Bowling movie: we figured out too late that although there are a lot of bowlers in the US, they don't like documentaries.
Charlotte: This is back to the business plan - in some sports or hobbies nobody goes to see movies, and in others, everybody goes.
Q: What works within each genre? [That's not a distribution question].
Charlotte: Most of the people up here on the panel like sophisticated films, but stupid films can sell well too.
Tom: All of the films I've bought that turned out successful were films that nobody else was bidding on, so I don't know. Let the Right One In, nobody else wanted that yet it did really well. On the other hand I paid a lot of money for Signal, and that lost a lot of money.
Q: I have a western set in Germany, will that work?
Charlotte: If you have a great western it could work in Europe. And Germans like westerns.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Sunday: Marketing panel #2, "Wide Releases"
American Film Market 2011 conference: unofficial notes
Nov 6, 2011 11 AM: Marketing Conference notes part 2: "Wide Releases"
Notes by B. Hahne
The original blog location of these notes is: http://2011afm.blogspot.com
This is day 3 of a 5-day series, check back at the blog for more as the days go by.
Clarifications or pithy comments by the note-taker will generally appear in [square brackets like this].
These notes are copyright (c) 2011 by Bruce Hahne. Noncommercial, nonprofit redistribution and/or pointing people to the blog is permitted and encouraged.
Disclaimers: "Free notes, you get what you pay for!" There notes are a summary, not a transcript, and represent my best effort to capture the panel discussion plus Q&A. They also probably contain errors. I'm not in the film industry, nor do I play somebody in the film industry on TV, nor am I affiliated with AFM / American Film Market or with any of the firms associated with the panelists.
---------------------------------------
[In general there were problems with this panel: the moderator had issues articulating succinct, coherent questions, she interrupted her panelists multiple times, and she doesn't understand the internet. This is the first panel at the conference where I observed multiple audience members walk out partway through.]
Moderator: Pamela Rodi, Executive VP for Marketing & Publicity, Myriad Pictures. Previously at Sony, 10 years.
Panelists:
- Vincent Bruzzese, President, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, Ipsos OTX MediaCT, generally known as "OTX". Research firm based in Hollywood.
- Tomas Jegeus, co-president for International, 20th Century Fox.
- Karina Kogan, CMO, BuzzMedia, an online publisher, owns ~36 web sites. BuzzMedia has movie studios as clients. Digital advertising and marketing.
- Jack Pan, EVP for Marketing, Summit Entertainment. Handles digital marketing. Summit has the Twilight series and Jack is working on Breaking Dawn.
--------------------
Pamela: This panel is about marketing "mainstream and wide releases" using current technologies.
Pamela: "New technologies", about the term. Tends to mean "anything that happens online or by phone or is an app." Is the terminology wrong? What's your definition?
Vincent: Depends on context, who is using the term? Movie industry is slow to adopt to technology. Much of Hollywood is still trying to figure out email. The real problem is how to use the tech.
Tomas: It's not new, everybody is using it. We used to have a "digital" department in my firm but we don't have that anymore, we don't have "digital watches", we just have "watches". Everybody is checking text messages in the morning when they get up. In the UK, radio listening is at its highest ever (this includes internet radio listening). TV viewing in the US is up - more ways to watch TV.
Pamela: Difficult to draw the line between tech as distribution mechanism, and tech as content.
Karina: Re "new tech", it's about richer experiences for the customer, ways we can improve marketing. How to captivate an audience, get them to watch a trailer.
Jack: Technology happens every day, "new" depends on the audience. At Summit, we look at what technology is permeating people's lives and how to tap into how people are using that technology.
Vincent: I have some examples.
- TV shows started going onto the internet - people said ratings would decline, which turned out to be wrong.
- "DVRs will make it possible to not watch TV commercials" -- turns out that a large number of DVR users will REWIND when they see a film trailer and watch the trailer.
- Twitter: people thought it would change everything but it turns out to be one of the least-impactful marketing methods. [Maybe in his realm?]
Pamela: Give some examples of how you structure a marketing spend for a wide-release film today.
Jack: Our TV spend hasn't decreased, if anything it's increased. TV viewing has INCREASED as a result of DVR, TV is still the most efficient way to reach a mass audience in a short amount of time. And of course our marketing campaigns are very fleeting compared to things like brand campaigns. Our efforts are focused around creating a big opening weekend. The places getting hit are outdoor [billboards] and print spend.
Pamela: BTW I have some stats here, despite the fantasy of all this "free advertising" to be had on the internet, 60% to 70% of filmgoer's decisionmaking process is based on seeing film trailers on TV.
Jack: Web is part of people's lives but it's very fragmented. Decentralized. The way to get scale is to use networks online that have scale, or something else. Reach is what matters for an ad campaign, and TV gives that. There are online publishers who do offer reach comparable to TV, but we use digital [I think he means internet - everything is "digital" these days] to reach targeted demographics.
Tomas: Print advertising is down even though people outside of the US still read newspapers. TV spend about the same. We're increasing outdoor ads - very influential outside of US. And next year 10% of outdoor screens [billboards] will be digital [i.e. not just giant fixed posterboards]. You can do things with those outdoor screens is fancy - you can build complex 3D campaigns. Not always allowed due to regulation in the US, but we do that in Mexico.
People used to never want to watch ads, but thankfully our commercials in the movie industry, people tend to want to watch them. You have to be in many different places - it used to be a few well-understood media channels. And we used to segment in quadrants, but today segmentation is much finer-grained. One film might have 20-25 different subgroups, and you can target those subgroups online. More work.
Pamela: Karina, about putting a campaign together. Tell us what happens.
Karina: We're about content. We try to partner with all the studios. How can we talk about your film in the period of time leading up to its release? We try to get content from the studios: exclusive stills, interviews with cast, etc. If an audience isn't engaged with your content then they won't be engaged with your advertising for the film. For Breaking Dawn we try to create lots of content around the film. We did an overlay animated wedding invitation on the film web site, replica of the invite in the film, and visitors can RSVP via Fbook or Twitter. If they RSVP'd via Fbook then that showed up in their friends list and went viral that way.
Pamela: The digital universe is vast - how do your firms decide what to do?
Jack: Yes, difficult to keep up with who offers the most scale - it changes quarter to quarter. We did a brainstorm with [web / online] publishers that have delivered in the past. Ended up with
Pamela: Are there standardized rankings in this business, like Nielsen? I'm confused.
Tomas: "Rate" is a tricky thing anyway. In TV, buying "rating points" doesn't necessarily tell you much these days - you don't know how many human beings actually sat there and watched the show. Similarly online.
Pamela: So how do you measure? [Why is she moderating the internet technology panel when she has no basic idea about success metrics commonly used in the industry?]
Tomas: Click-thrus is one way. You buy effectiveness.
Vincent: There's no shortage of companies pitching services in this space.
[Discussion about hit counts]
Karina: Not easy to get 1M Youtube hits. It turns out you have a higher probability of getting hit by a bus than getting 1M Youtube hits. You can't think "I'll just put this up on the web and the universe will embrace it."
Vincent: TV spend vs. non-TV. The decision about whether to see a movie these days is often made weeks, or more than weeks, in advance of the release date. Yet 60%+ of the marketing spend still tends to be on TV ads in the week of the release.
Pamela: non-US, are Fbook and Twitter also big?
Tomas: Twitter not as big, but Fbook will continue to grow for next 5 years. Fbook is overtaking the local players in every market. It will grow in all emerging markets: Brazil, Russia. Not presently in China. Then Fbook will reach saturation point and go down. Incredibly important for us right now.
Jack: Our Fbook interaction is 2/3 non-US is what we see.
Tomas: We don't do web sites anymore, there's no point. Well, we make it as a landing page sort of. We use the vehicles out there already: Fbook, some other media portal, somebody with audience. Youtube.
Jack: For us it's the aggregate of what you do across many places - you're never going to get these huge crowds coming to your web site. Also different across different industries. If you're a restaurant with locations and coupons and so on, that's different. As a movie we need to get our message across many different places in a very short amount of time. That's different from established brands that have been around for decades.
Pamela: About genre differences, are there differences in how you use digital [she means internet] campaigns?
Tomas: It's not about genre, it varies per movie. We put the trailer up for our anti-hero superhero film, and normally when you do this on Youtube you don't get that many hits for a new property, but we've got almost 1-to-1 when people see the trailer that they want to comment on the trailer. So for now, all we're going to do is push the trailer - no cast interviews, nothing else, because we don't have to, we have the trailer. With other films if you don't have an immediate hook with the trailer then you need to add more content, and you can push different content to different segments - it depends on the film and the audience segmentation.
Pamela: You have to customize all that content for all those segments.
Tomas: with TV you couldn't segment like that at all.
Vincent: You do get fanboys who say well, I can't help a film, but I can hurt a film, I can spread bad word of mouth about it. I'm finding nowadays that the goals of these campaigns are simply to not piss off the fanboy community, keep them happy. And then you can start your actual campaign elsewhere.
Karina: We had that with one of our films, fanbase reaction to a casting decision was very negative, so the studio rapidly worked with us to release cast shots of the actress with the right hair color, etc. (Pacify the rabid fans.)
[Discussion about movie posters.]
Tomas: Used to be that the poster was just for the movie theaters, and then the poster was offered online as an afterthought. That's changing. Most people are connecting to the internet via mobile phone - you need to think about something that works in postage stamp size AND can be blown up - the traditional movie poster doesn't work well.
Vincent: The posters work well now - you see the poster and then people immediately go online on their mobile and look up the movie. They're IN the theater seeing the poster for an upcoming movie, and instead of waiting 5 months for a trailer that comes out later, the poster is making them look for more info right now.
Karina: You had earlier asked "how far in advance is too soon?" For Bridesmaids: the cast wasn't A-list, it's a chick flick, can it be funny at all, is raunchy humor with women even OK, no cast that we can put onto Leno or Late Night. We work with a lot of celebrities who blog on our site. So we created viral videos of these celebrities talking about their bachelorette parties, raunchy stuff, being bridesmaids. that generated a lot of buzz, so we got 200% more views of the trailer than the studio was expecting. It worked because we started early.
-----------------------------
Q: Karina and Jack, about the wedding invitation thing for Twilight, give us some numbers, who viewed, how many purchased. [She thinks she's going to get exact marketing response numbers for a major property? Please. I'm sure those numbers are highly guarded.]
Jack: That's one metric among many and I don't have the numbers in front of me. We did extra work to make sure tickets were available for sale when we started advertising. We even tagged out TV spots with "tickets now available online!" which is not a common practice. Every time we've had an opportunity for an invitation, we took it. But hard to correlate online ticket sales to any specific marketing event/spend, since there were many things in-flight at one time. BTW, the number of Fbook fans and number of trailer views doesn't correlate well with total box office - there are too many variables. You might get CTR of 1.2% which is a fantastic percentage, but it doesn't tell you how well your box office will be.
Q: Hollywood has a "major expert problem" [?? Oh, the guy apparently wants to advance the thesis that the entire movie marketing profession is a scam, it's all just chaos anyway.]
Vincent: I wouldn't want to ignore the past. Sex and the City, and Bridesmaids, are very different properties yet you can learn something from one and apply it to the other.
Pamela: In this business there are potholes, and you can end up falling into those with some filmmakers, but we try to be experts as best we can.
Q: - Re the Twilight RSVP, was that targeted at fans and how do you avoid ad overload?
- Re viral: how do you create good ones without celebrity access?
Karina: Re Twilight, we know we have a very engaged audience, and we're the authorities on the subject - we have one of the biggest bloggers who writes "Breaking Down Breaking Dawn" on our site. I don't think people considered the ads to be an assault - if you come to an entertainment website you expect to see entertainment ads. Re the viral question: you don't have to have stars to make a popular video.
Q: - iPhone apps, please comment.
- Rewarding people with Tshirts and such for sharing with friends?
- Budget: what % spend online vs. radio vs. other?
Pamela: Nobody is going to share exact percentages with you.
Tomas: The spend depends. We sometimes spend 40% of the media budget online. Sometimes it's only 10%.
Karina: I just did a campaign for our own web sites and we had 4-cent cost per acquisition on Fbook, which is very good since we were so targeted. It literally cost us only $50 to test that.
Vincent: Re apps, people will download a Twilight app, but for most movies people aren't going to do that.
Jack: Right it's about the value proposition to the user - you can create an app for any movie, but what will the user get out of that app that persuades them to add that app to the collection they already have.
Tomas: Right, among the thousands of apps being created every day, why will they download your app? We did do an app for Rio and linked it with Angry Birds, which was huge success, but we tied it to that existing property.
Q: "Wide release", what's the smallest number of theaters you've worked on for a release?
A1: 600-1000 is considered wide release. But these days you don't usually see that, you either see super-saturation or you see platform [staged, local] releases.
A2: Remember this panel is about wide-release films. Also remember the "digital" part of a buy is coupled with a big media spend all over the place. Many of the questions here seem to be coming from an assumption that you can do ALL marketing online. [Yes, that's because the audience is entirely microbudget filmmakers who are clawing for some way to make their ideas succeed. Mismatch between audience and panel.]
Q: Re piracy, is this changing your ad campaigns?
Tomas: Piracy has changed how we release. We now do day-and-date releases in Russia, same date as US, since Russia is the hub of piracy, it starts there and spreads. Family films tend to still survive piracy somehow. Tintin will be interesting - that's releasing all over the world but NOT releasing in the US yet, what's going to happen there? Pirated releases are online within HOURS of your release of a film now. All releases have been pushed towards simultaneous releases.
-----------
Pamela: Future of advertising?
Tomas: The same problems are there - how do you get people to listen to your marketing message? I could have the Fbook ID of everybody in the world and that doesn't necessarily help me.
Vincent: Information is the market of the future. Many people now make up their minds about whether to see a movie based on the 3-sentence IMDB description, which by the way nobody ever takes credit for, we don't know who writes those.
Karina: Targeting is getting more interesting. Advertisers often know more about you. Video is interesting, particularly WRT mobile.
Jack: Hyper-targeting is something to watch. Make a moviegoing experience specific to people based on location, they're near a specific theater, or near a group of fans. How much can we hyper-localize?
Q: As an indy filmmaker, if I get a name actor and want to pitch to a distributor, and if we try to go viral on the internet, are there things we should NOT be doing to avoid stepping on distributor toes?
Pamela: Probably everything that you did. Some distributors are sensitive and want to control everything. In publicity you can't go back to the same media outlets with the same story a second time. A "unit publicist" working with your publicist will help you make these decisions.
Q: So you're saying I need to decide in advance how the film will be distributed? [poor guy, this is the wrong group of people to give advice to small-budget independent filmmakers.]
------
Q: Economic downturn. Many distributors have closed but their leads are sometimes now working as independent consultants. These are called "PMDs". What do you think about doing that, working with "service deal" companies?
Vincent: Some are worth it, some aren't. And depends on the type of film. Look at their track record. But this is an industry of connections, and that often matters more than anything else.
Q: I've heard about anti-piracy campaigns in which fake copies of movies are uploaded to torrent sites in an attempt to saturate the torrent market with bad copies - is that still happening?
Jack: If you go online you'll see all kinds of links that claim to be to movies, and it's just people trying to get you to go to their site - that's not us, that's just happening organically.
Karina: I had a client who said they wanted to "leak" a clip through us, i.e. make it look like it was leaked. So we did it and then 24 hours later the studio called us and said "take it down, we don't have international rights!" Well, too late.
Pamela: You need to clear all the music rights, etc. At AFM there have often been prework prints shared, and they use uncleared music, that's just in the room showing it to a potential buyer in private, but now this stuff is ending up online. And people will take the info sheets and posters and scan them.
Pamela: I'm also much more aware of international now - natural disasters can change your marketing strategy. What happens to the Euro impacts your strategy.
Vincent: Cultural issues matter for trailers. In some countries for Iron Man, you want to show the clips of him helping people, that's what heroes do. Alvin and the Chipmunks won't be a good sell in Japan, the CGI isn't going to play with expectations there.
Pamela: Things that hamper international releases include access to your talent. Big issue - by the time you get the international distribution, often your talent is onto the next project, not available [to do or assist media events].
Q: Wouldn't you do the interviews onsite, like on set, release the content later when you need it?
Pamela: You need the journalists from the relevant venues onsite to do the interviews (long explanation of process).
Nov 6, 2011 11 AM: Marketing Conference notes part 2: "Wide Releases"
Notes by B. Hahne
The original blog location of these notes is: http://2011afm.blogspot.com
This is day 3 of a 5-day series, check back at the blog for more as the days go by.
Clarifications or pithy comments by the note-taker will generally appear in [square brackets like this].
These notes are copyright (c) 2011 by Bruce Hahne. Noncommercial, nonprofit redistribution and/or pointing people to the blog is permitted and encouraged.
Disclaimers: "Free notes, you get what you pay for!" There notes are a summary, not a transcript, and represent my best effort to capture the panel discussion plus Q&A. They also probably contain errors. I'm not in the film industry, nor do I play somebody in the film industry on TV, nor am I affiliated with AFM / American Film Market or with any of the firms associated with the panelists.
---------------------------------------
[In general there were problems with this panel: the moderator had issues articulating succinct, coherent questions, she interrupted her panelists multiple times, and she doesn't understand the internet. This is the first panel at the conference where I observed multiple audience members walk out partway through.]
Moderator: Pamela Rodi, Executive VP for Marketing & Publicity, Myriad Pictures. Previously at Sony, 10 years.
Panelists:
- Vincent Bruzzese, President, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, Ipsos OTX MediaCT, generally known as "OTX". Research firm based in Hollywood.
- Tomas Jegeus, co-president for International, 20th Century Fox.
- Karina Kogan, CMO, BuzzMedia, an online publisher, owns ~36 web sites. BuzzMedia has movie studios as clients. Digital advertising and marketing.
- Jack Pan, EVP for Marketing, Summit Entertainment. Handles digital marketing. Summit has the Twilight series and Jack is working on Breaking Dawn.
--------------------
Pamela: This panel is about marketing "mainstream and wide releases" using current technologies.
Pamela: "New technologies", about the term. Tends to mean "anything that happens online or by phone or is an app." Is the terminology wrong? What's your definition?
Vincent: Depends on context, who is using the term? Movie industry is slow to adopt to technology. Much of Hollywood is still trying to figure out email. The real problem is how to use the tech.
Tomas: It's not new, everybody is using it. We used to have a "digital" department in my firm but we don't have that anymore, we don't have "digital watches", we just have "watches". Everybody is checking text messages in the morning when they get up. In the UK, radio listening is at its highest ever (this includes internet radio listening). TV viewing in the US is up - more ways to watch TV.
Pamela: Difficult to draw the line between tech as distribution mechanism, and tech as content.
Karina: Re "new tech", it's about richer experiences for the customer, ways we can improve marketing. How to captivate an audience, get them to watch a trailer.
Jack: Technology happens every day, "new" depends on the audience. At Summit, we look at what technology is permeating people's lives and how to tap into how people are using that technology.
Vincent: I have some examples.
- TV shows started going onto the internet - people said ratings would decline, which turned out to be wrong.
- "DVRs will make it possible to not watch TV commercials" -- turns out that a large number of DVR users will REWIND when they see a film trailer and watch the trailer.
- Twitter: people thought it would change everything but it turns out to be one of the least-impactful marketing methods. [Maybe in his realm?]
Pamela: Give some examples of how you structure a marketing spend for a wide-release film today.
Jack: Our TV spend hasn't decreased, if anything it's increased. TV viewing has INCREASED as a result of DVR, TV is still the most efficient way to reach a mass audience in a short amount of time. And of course our marketing campaigns are very fleeting compared to things like brand campaigns. Our efforts are focused around creating a big opening weekend. The places getting hit are outdoor [billboards] and print spend.
Pamela: BTW I have some stats here, despite the fantasy of all this "free advertising" to be had on the internet, 60% to 70% of filmgoer's decisionmaking process is based on seeing film trailers on TV.
Jack: Web is part of people's lives but it's very fragmented. Decentralized. The way to get scale is to use networks online that have scale, or something else. Reach is what matters for an ad campaign, and TV gives that. There are online publishers who do offer reach comparable to TV, but we use digital [I think he means internet - everything is "digital" these days] to reach targeted demographics.
Tomas: Print advertising is down even though people outside of the US still read newspapers. TV spend about the same. We're increasing outdoor ads - very influential outside of US. And next year 10% of outdoor screens [billboards] will be digital [i.e. not just giant fixed posterboards]. You can do things with those outdoor screens is fancy - you can build complex 3D campaigns. Not always allowed due to regulation in the US, but we do that in Mexico.
People used to never want to watch ads, but thankfully our commercials in the movie industry, people tend to want to watch them. You have to be in many different places - it used to be a few well-understood media channels. And we used to segment in quadrants, but today segmentation is much finer-grained. One film might have 20-25 different subgroups, and you can target those subgroups online. More work.
Pamela: Karina, about putting a campaign together. Tell us what happens.
Karina: We're about content. We try to partner with all the studios. How can we talk about your film in the period of time leading up to its release? We try to get content from the studios: exclusive stills, interviews with cast, etc. If an audience isn't engaged with your content then they won't be engaged with your advertising for the film. For Breaking Dawn we try to create lots of content around the film. We did an overlay animated wedding invitation on the film web site, replica of the invite in the film, and visitors can RSVP via Fbook or Twitter. If they RSVP'd via Fbook then that showed up in their friends list and went viral that way.
Pamela: The digital universe is vast - how do your firms decide what to do?
Jack: Yes, difficult to keep up with who offers the most scale - it changes quarter to quarter. We did a brainstorm with [web / online] publishers that have delivered in the past. Ended up with
Pamela: Are there standardized rankings in this business, like Nielsen? I'm confused.
Tomas: "Rate" is a tricky thing anyway. In TV, buying "rating points" doesn't necessarily tell you much these days - you don't know how many human beings actually sat there and watched the show. Similarly online.
Pamela: So how do you measure? [Why is she moderating the internet technology panel when she has no basic idea about success metrics commonly used in the industry?]
Tomas: Click-thrus is one way. You buy effectiveness.
Vincent: There's no shortage of companies pitching services in this space.
[Discussion about hit counts]
Karina: Not easy to get 1M Youtube hits. It turns out you have a higher probability of getting hit by a bus than getting 1M Youtube hits. You can't think "I'll just put this up on the web and the universe will embrace it."
Vincent: TV spend vs. non-TV. The decision about whether to see a movie these days is often made weeks, or more than weeks, in advance of the release date. Yet 60%+ of the marketing spend still tends to be on TV ads in the week of the release.
Pamela: non-US, are Fbook and Twitter also big?
Tomas: Twitter not as big, but Fbook will continue to grow for next 5 years. Fbook is overtaking the local players in every market. It will grow in all emerging markets: Brazil, Russia. Not presently in China. Then Fbook will reach saturation point and go down. Incredibly important for us right now.
Jack: Our Fbook interaction is 2/3 non-US is what we see.
Tomas: We don't do web sites anymore, there's no point. Well, we make it as a landing page sort of. We use the vehicles out there already: Fbook, some other media portal, somebody with audience. Youtube.
Jack: For us it's the aggregate of what you do across many places - you're never going to get these huge crowds coming to your web site. Also different across different industries. If you're a restaurant with locations and coupons and so on, that's different. As a movie we need to get our message across many different places in a very short amount of time. That's different from established brands that have been around for decades.
Pamela: About genre differences, are there differences in how you use digital [she means internet] campaigns?
Tomas: It's not about genre, it varies per movie. We put the trailer up for our anti-hero superhero film, and normally when you do this on Youtube you don't get that many hits for a new property, but we've got almost 1-to-1 when people see the trailer that they want to comment on the trailer. So for now, all we're going to do is push the trailer - no cast interviews, nothing else, because we don't have to, we have the trailer. With other films if you don't have an immediate hook with the trailer then you need to add more content, and you can push different content to different segments - it depends on the film and the audience segmentation.
Pamela: You have to customize all that content for all those segments.
Tomas: with TV you couldn't segment like that at all.
Vincent: You do get fanboys who say well, I can't help a film, but I can hurt a film, I can spread bad word of mouth about it. I'm finding nowadays that the goals of these campaigns are simply to not piss off the fanboy community, keep them happy. And then you can start your actual campaign elsewhere.
Karina: We had that with one of our films, fanbase reaction to a casting decision was very negative, so the studio rapidly worked with us to release cast shots of the actress with the right hair color, etc. (Pacify the rabid fans.)
[Discussion about movie posters.]
Tomas: Used to be that the poster was just for the movie theaters, and then the poster was offered online as an afterthought. That's changing. Most people are connecting to the internet via mobile phone - you need to think about something that works in postage stamp size AND can be blown up - the traditional movie poster doesn't work well.
Vincent: The posters work well now - you see the poster and then people immediately go online on their mobile and look up the movie. They're IN the theater seeing the poster for an upcoming movie, and instead of waiting 5 months for a trailer that comes out later, the poster is making them look for more info right now.
Karina: You had earlier asked "how far in advance is too soon?" For Bridesmaids: the cast wasn't A-list, it's a chick flick, can it be funny at all, is raunchy humor with women even OK, no cast that we can put onto Leno or Late Night. We work with a lot of celebrities who blog on our site. So we created viral videos of these celebrities talking about their bachelorette parties, raunchy stuff, being bridesmaids. that generated a lot of buzz, so we got 200% more views of the trailer than the studio was expecting. It worked because we started early.
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Q: Karina and Jack, about the wedding invitation thing for Twilight, give us some numbers, who viewed, how many purchased. [She thinks she's going to get exact marketing response numbers for a major property? Please. I'm sure those numbers are highly guarded.]
Jack: That's one metric among many and I don't have the numbers in front of me. We did extra work to make sure tickets were available for sale when we started advertising. We even tagged out TV spots with "tickets now available online!" which is not a common practice. Every time we've had an opportunity for an invitation, we took it. But hard to correlate online ticket sales to any specific marketing event/spend, since there were many things in-flight at one time. BTW, the number of Fbook fans and number of trailer views doesn't correlate well with total box office - there are too many variables. You might get CTR of 1.2% which is a fantastic percentage, but it doesn't tell you how well your box office will be.
Q: Hollywood has a "major expert problem" [?? Oh, the guy apparently wants to advance the thesis that the entire movie marketing profession is a scam, it's all just chaos anyway.]
Vincent: I wouldn't want to ignore the past. Sex and the City, and Bridesmaids, are very different properties yet you can learn something from one and apply it to the other.
Pamela: In this business there are potholes, and you can end up falling into those with some filmmakers, but we try to be experts as best we can.
Q: - Re the Twilight RSVP, was that targeted at fans and how do you avoid ad overload?
- Re viral: how do you create good ones without celebrity access?
Karina: Re Twilight, we know we have a very engaged audience, and we're the authorities on the subject - we have one of the biggest bloggers who writes "Breaking Down Breaking Dawn" on our site. I don't think people considered the ads to be an assault - if you come to an entertainment website you expect to see entertainment ads. Re the viral question: you don't have to have stars to make a popular video.
Q: - iPhone apps, please comment.
- Rewarding people with Tshirts and such for sharing with friends?
- Budget: what % spend online vs. radio vs. other?
Pamela: Nobody is going to share exact percentages with you.
Tomas: The spend depends. We sometimes spend 40% of the media budget online. Sometimes it's only 10%.
Karina: I just did a campaign for our own web sites and we had 4-cent cost per acquisition on Fbook, which is very good since we were so targeted. It literally cost us only $50 to test that.
Vincent: Re apps, people will download a Twilight app, but for most movies people aren't going to do that.
Jack: Right it's about the value proposition to the user - you can create an app for any movie, but what will the user get out of that app that persuades them to add that app to the collection they already have.
Tomas: Right, among the thousands of apps being created every day, why will they download your app? We did do an app for Rio and linked it with Angry Birds, which was huge success, but we tied it to that existing property.
Q: "Wide release", what's the smallest number of theaters you've worked on for a release?
A1: 600-1000 is considered wide release. But these days you don't usually see that, you either see super-saturation or you see platform [staged, local] releases.
A2: Remember this panel is about wide-release films. Also remember the "digital" part of a buy is coupled with a big media spend all over the place. Many of the questions here seem to be coming from an assumption that you can do ALL marketing online. [Yes, that's because the audience is entirely microbudget filmmakers who are clawing for some way to make their ideas succeed. Mismatch between audience and panel.]
Q: Re piracy, is this changing your ad campaigns?
Tomas: Piracy has changed how we release. We now do day-and-date releases in Russia, same date as US, since Russia is the hub of piracy, it starts there and spreads. Family films tend to still survive piracy somehow. Tintin will be interesting - that's releasing all over the world but NOT releasing in the US yet, what's going to happen there? Pirated releases are online within HOURS of your release of a film now. All releases have been pushed towards simultaneous releases.
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Pamela: Future of advertising?
Tomas: The same problems are there - how do you get people to listen to your marketing message? I could have the Fbook ID of everybody in the world and that doesn't necessarily help me.
Vincent: Information is the market of the future. Many people now make up their minds about whether to see a movie based on the 3-sentence IMDB description, which by the way nobody ever takes credit for, we don't know who writes those.
Karina: Targeting is getting more interesting. Advertisers often know more about you. Video is interesting, particularly WRT mobile.
Jack: Hyper-targeting is something to watch. Make a moviegoing experience specific to people based on location, they're near a specific theater, or near a group of fans. How much can we hyper-localize?
Q: As an indy filmmaker, if I get a name actor and want to pitch to a distributor, and if we try to go viral on the internet, are there things we should NOT be doing to avoid stepping on distributor toes?
Pamela: Probably everything that you did. Some distributors are sensitive and want to control everything. In publicity you can't go back to the same media outlets with the same story a second time. A "unit publicist" working with your publicist will help you make these decisions.
Q: So you're saying I need to decide in advance how the film will be distributed? [poor guy, this is the wrong group of people to give advice to small-budget independent filmmakers.]
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Q: Economic downturn. Many distributors have closed but their leads are sometimes now working as independent consultants. These are called "PMDs". What do you think about doing that, working with "service deal" companies?
Vincent: Some are worth it, some aren't. And depends on the type of film. Look at their track record. But this is an industry of connections, and that often matters more than anything else.
Q: I've heard about anti-piracy campaigns in which fake copies of movies are uploaded to torrent sites in an attempt to saturate the torrent market with bad copies - is that still happening?
Jack: If you go online you'll see all kinds of links that claim to be to movies, and it's just people trying to get you to go to their site - that's not us, that's just happening organically.
Karina: I had a client who said they wanted to "leak" a clip through us, i.e. make it look like it was leaked. So we did it and then 24 hours later the studio called us and said "take it down, we don't have international rights!" Well, too late.
Pamela: You need to clear all the music rights, etc. At AFM there have often been prework prints shared, and they use uncleared music, that's just in the room showing it to a potential buyer in private, but now this stuff is ending up online. And people will take the info sheets and posters and scan them.
Pamela: I'm also much more aware of international now - natural disasters can change your marketing strategy. What happens to the Euro impacts your strategy.
Vincent: Cultural issues matter for trailers. In some countries for Iron Man, you want to show the clips of him helping people, that's what heroes do. Alvin and the Chipmunks won't be a good sell in Japan, the CGI isn't going to play with expectations there.
Pamela: Things that hamper international releases include access to your talent. Big issue - by the time you get the international distribution, often your talent is onto the next project, not available [to do or assist media events].
Q: Wouldn't you do the interviews onsite, like on set, release the content later when you need it?
Pamela: You need the journalists from the relevant venues onsite to do the interviews (long explanation of process).
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