Oscar Season

If you've followed this blog, you may know that we have a monthly movie group and that we conduct research for the movie industry. With the Oscars approaching, I've been trying to get out and see as many movies as possible -- and also hoping that Netflix members begin to return movies faster, so Long Wait becomes Wait, and Wait becomes Shipping Today. (This process can be quite frustrating.)

And earlier this week I came across a fascinating article on the industry : Tad Friend's look inside the marketing of movies (which focuses on Lionsgate's intriguing co-president of theatrical marketing, Tim Palen). First, from the article:

Modern campaigns have three acts: a year or more before the film débuts, you introduce it with ninety-second teaser trailers and viral Internet "leaks" of gossip or early footage, in preparation for the main trailer, which appears four months before the release; five weeks before the film opens, you start saturating with a "flight" of thirty-second TV spots; and, at the end, you remind with fifteen-second spots, newspaper ads, and billboards. Studios typically spend about ten million dollars on the "basics" (cutting trailers and designing posters, conducting market research, flying the film's talent to the junket and the première, and the première itself) and thirty million on the media buy. Between seventy and eighty percent of that is spent on television advertising (enough so that viewers should see the ads an average of fifteen times), eight or nine percent on Internet ads, and the remainder on newspaper and outdoor advertising.

Good stuff. The article was subtitled "Inside a movie marketer's playbook," which initially caught my attention because of a recent movie-industry study we conducted that examined how consumers use various sources to make movie-going decisions. The study led to the creation of a playbook for our clients to leverage the Internet most effectively as an advertising and informational resource for consumers.

I was particularly interested when the article got around to the subject of test screening and how it's used. Again, from Friend's piece:

[T]he percentage who thought the film excellent or very good, the so-called "top two boxes," went from sixty-five at the earlier screening to seventy-four--in other words, from worrisome to respectable. (Studios love to see scores in the eighties.) Yet testing is fraught: it rewards comedy, narrative, and familiar stars or plot elements, and often undervalues the new. Executives' testing stories take divergent paths to the same punch line. Either they decided not to tamper with a "Pulp Fiction," despite testing results invariably described as "the lowest scores in the studio's history," or they were confounded when an "Akeelah and the Bee" faltered commercially despite "the highest scores in the studio's history." In both scenarios, the numbers lied. "Testing is a sham," one marketing consultant says. "All you've learned is what people thought of a movie they didn't have to pay for. It does not mean they're going to go pay for it."

First, this glosses over the fact that movies can be, and are, tested both qualitatively and quantitatively. While the quantitative side usually consists of a big audience and a short questionnaire, the qualitative research is done by bringing viewers into smaller focus groups. These methodologies should be used together to find out what people think of the film and what could make it better.

But Friend is right -- to a degree: in both scenarios, the numbers from the quantitative research lied. But the marketing consultant's conclusion that testing is "a sham" doesn't follow.

Numbers lie all the time if they're not interpreted correctly. That's where the art of research comes in. For example, in our advertising testing in particular, there have been many instances where we've tested a half-dozen different creatives and asked respondents to give scores to each one. And sure, we look at the data, and one or two creatives usually stand out as scoring the highest.

But sometimes lower-rated pieces that represent a somewhat higher risk also represent the possibility of much higher reward. It's only upon listening to the discussion from a point of understanding what the client is trying to communicate that we can assess what's worth considering. And that's what Friend leaves out.