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Net promos turn into free rides(Daily Variety Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) When it comes to a movie like "Mission: Impossible III," everybody online wants a piece of the action. Amy Powell, Paramount senior VP of interactive marketing, jokes that it would be easier to name the sites she didn't make deals with on "MI3" than to list the many partners who were onboard. A visit to Yahoo Movies in the days leading up to release found the site overtaken by the action pic: animated banners up top, branded buttons, a custom background and an exploding rich-media ad that launched Tom Cruise across the page. And those were just the pieces Paramount could buy. Studios including Par spent more than $TK million, all told, on Internet advertising last year, an TK% uptick over 2004. But with online publicity almost inextricable with ad purchases, that figure seems to belie the sheer amount of film promotion online. Yahoo's deal with Paramount gave the portal top-level access to Tom Cruise and the "MI3" talent: live coverage of the New York premiere, one-on-one interaction with Cruise in Rome, early exclusive clips featuring commentary from J.J. Abrams and more. "Let's not look at this as a media buy," Powell told Yahoo. "Let's look at this as a true partnership, and a true partnership has to include the distribution of our content and allowing your fans to have access to our talent." This level of "partnership" wasn't free for Par: "I think it's fair to say that an ad buy needs to be of a certain level for us to want to create the kind of robust editorial packages that we would put around this," notes David Katz, head of sports and entertainment for Yahoo. But on the Internet, where marketing material such as trailers and electronic press kit clips are presented as "content," studio publicity departments can leverage their assets to augment a traditional ad buy. And in some cases, they can gain exposure for their films without spending a dime. "Promotional content for movies is content to us, whether it's promotional in nature or not," says Erik Flannigan, VP of programming at AOL. On May 2, AOL's Moviefone site exclusively introduced the next Bond movie's first trailer. "These are things that also show up on 'Entertainment Tonight' and 'Access Hollywood,' but believe me, the enthusiasm for people to see the first teaser for 'Casino Royale,' that's real --- that's a piece of content that's entertaining, interesting and compelling in and of itself," Flannigan adds. The idea of syndicating marketing materials online is really not so different from what studios used to do for TV, explains Don Buckley, senior VP of interactive marketing for Warner Bros. "When I first got started in the movie business, we used to make these featurettes with commercial breaks built in, and we'd just send them out by the hundreds to independent TV stations around the country," he says. For "Superman Returns," Buckley commissioned 27 custom video production journals and syndicated them to sites eager enough to feature the content for free. He started by offering the episodes exclusively to Fresno-based Superman fan site BlueTights.net. But as interest grew, he repackaged the material for other sites , including the Apple iTunes store, where the video podcasts have been downloaded more than 39 million times. Universal practices the same philosophy when building the official site for one of its movies. All of the content --- games, interactive features and so on --- is designed to be modularized so it can be taken out to other sites. "Integrated placements we know are the ones that moviegoers react to the most," says Doug Neil, U's senior VP of new media. "That can often be a paid placement. You might call it an advertorial, but to the consumer it looks like a piece of editorial. Those are highly valued placements." Studios may ask for promotional commitments upfront when they syndicate exclusive trailers and such to partners, but they can't necessarily dictate when or where the content will be featured editorially. "That's an ad sales opportunity," says Gordon Paddison, exec VP of integrated marketing for New Line. "If you're sponsoring an area, they will make sure that they pull the content aside and highlight it." Rich-media banners for New Line's "Hoot" on targeted partner sites autoplay a 30-second trailer and allow users to download a desktop owl directly from the ad. "It really makes sense to brand a destination where you know that audience lives," says Dwight Caines, exec VP of worldwide digital marketing at Columbia TriStar. On "The Da Vinci Code," Caines approached Google with a program custom-tailored to the site: a daily puzzle quest that highlights select Google tools as well as key elements of the movie. The cost of that partnership? "That was essentially a handshake," he says. |