I don’t know how many of you follow box office results, but I’d like to point your attention to Paranormal Activity, a horror movie getting a slow rollout from Paramount that just this past weekend grossed $19.6 million from just 760 screens. That’s a per screen average of $25,813—a number more common for a summer blockbuster than a small, independent, genre film with a budget of $11,000. So how did this small movie get so big? Marketing, and more specifically a very smart use of social media.
Paramount first premiered the movie at a number of midnight screenings on Sept. 25th, positioning the film as a one-time event not to be missed. Paramount then capitalized on the strong positive buzz that came from these screenings by deploying a “street team” to promote the movie on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Posts encouraged other users to demand the film come to their home town on Eventful.com. If users demanded the film one million times, Paramount would distribute the film nationally. Even though national distribution was already part of Paramount’s plan, the ‘demand it’ strategy created greater interest in the film by actively engaging consumers in the distribution process. Also, it provided fans of the film with the opportunity to serve as lead advocates and encourage friends and family to demand the film as well.
Paramount’s use of social media here is pretty refreshing. Too often, studios spend millions of dollars on expensive TV and print advertising campaigns to drive up first weekend box office grosses, yet the ads do little to really engage the consumer. Paramount’s lower cost approach allows it to put the movie into markets where it is likely to succeed (based on the areas where it has been most frequently demanded) while continuing to build demand in other markets by giving consumers a stake in its release, thus leading to better box office results than those typical of a horror film. Of course, the success of such an initiative relies heavily on the quality of the film—a bad movie would be unlikely to capitalize on word of mouth effectively.
MLC members can click here for more information on driving word-of-mouth through social networks.
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on 26 October 09
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Did you see where Bob Iger (Disney CEO) just said the movie industry business model needs shaking up (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091026/media_nm/us_disney_movies_costs), and it looks like it may not just be about shaking up production and marketing…its also about shaking up distribution? A few days ago announced they’re moving away from DVD sales and to something called Keychest…a cloud-based service that allows a consumer to access IP across multiple platforms (http://trendsupdates.com/walt-disney-to-dunk-dvd-sales-model/)