
Ben Johnson
The Truth About Planning In Online Movie Marketing

The competition and challenges of film launches are only set to become more difficult over the coming years with the ongoing expansion of services like Netflix, Amazon, HBO, etc. Despite this pressure, movie production is growing and there is a fantastic array of new content entering the market each year. The range of stories and storytelling only seem to be getting better and better.
We embarked on analysing the status quo and breaking down what steps distributors, filmmakers, producers and entertainment content producers in general can take to cut through the noise to bring their content in front of the relevant audiences.
The final result is Winning Your Audiences. Movie Marketing in the Connected World- an ebook filled with case studies and actionable insights driven from our activity here at Gruvi. The entire ebook is available to download for free:
In the first part of the ebook, we discussed the socio-economic and political factors that are affecting film launches, highlighting the increased competition and complex issues producers and film distributors face today.
In this section, we will take you through some strategies that will allow you to maximise the impact of your marketing, so that you have the best chance to reach and engage your audiences. We will describe some of the processes we use at Gruvi to ensure that media buys and ad creatives work hand in hand. We will also cover strategies for how to optimize audience interactions during the film’s life cycle.
Digital marketing presents many valuable opportunities to distributors looking to market their film and should, in our opinion, form a substantial part of the marketing budget for any contemporary campaign. The beauty of digital is its transparency, specificity, and scale. However there are a few important perception problems that need to change in order to better make sense of this complex advertising and communication medium.
The Myth of Online Marketing
The myth of online marketing is that people buy what is being advertised from the first ad they see.

Excuse the caveman language but Rand Fishkin, in his excellent Slideshare presentation, makes this very valid point.

The truth is that digital advertising requires multiple touch points with the consumer over time and the building of an overall good experience, in order for them to remember the brand when they have a need for the product.
You are Marketing to Humans If you start with the mindset that you are building trust over time rather than accelerating the user towards a transaction, this will meaningfully impact the way you rconduct your marketing. It will also help you understand why it’s so important to build the conversation (chatter) around your film.
Your Audience Needs Time The pressure of blockbuster economics and constrictive release windows leads to a model of release that simply doesn’t work economically for most movies. The main reason is that the timing normally doesn’t fit with how most audiences find out about movies, let alone with how they organise their lives around going to the cinema. Take a look at this chart taken from Google’s 2012 Win the Moments that Matter presentation delivered at UNIC (the same principles, in a more general form, are shared here). In this chart they plot the number of search enquiries for a movie title during the course of its release cycle. Note that this release was for a major tentpole production, with all the luxuries of a huge marketing spend, lots of content to seed, and a dedicated marketing & social team.

Google’s 2012 Win the Moments that Matter — Adapted with Gruvi’s analysis of when and how the marketing budgets are typically allocated.