Facebook under fire: movie distributor budgets

Adweeks recent blog post about the perception of Facebook within the Movie Industry does seem to correctly reflect the attitudes we have encountered, although the reference to a ‘Red Headed Step Child’ for film marketing seems a bit harsh.

From our work with studios, the targeting and community management features are the under appreciated factor of Facebook. Within the movie business, too much emphasis is still placed on creative, which is important, but often becomes the key intangible metric before a film releases that studios judge success on. Targeted media spend (buying the right eyeball), landing page optimization (what the eyeball sees), action based analytics and performance measurement (what that eyeballs does) combined with an excellent social narrative, fantastic creative and responsive community management are the keys to success. The more we work in the industry the more we understand that it’s the fragmentation of responsibilities between agents involved in the films launch and the silo’d approach to film budgets that often prohibit these steps from from working together smoothly. The tool is not at fault, it’s how it is used.

I can only quote from experience of recent campaign results where we achieved 6000 complex user registrations through a 7 step form that included manually entering personal details for 850GBP for a major UK TV company. Or our work on the movie LOL, where Scandinavia was the only reported region that made money.

That being said I do see big troubles brewing for Facebook if it fails to get to grips with the problem of ‘Like’ farms and Fake Profiles. Check out the complexity of this fake profile which amazingly enough claims to be based in Finland and rolls into the issues that are so distinctly described from Veritasium’s Youtube Channel. If Facebook does not get this under control they risk ruining their reputation before they even have the chance to educate studios and their marketing teams of the benefits of using their platform.

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