Filmpromo.de – Trends und Best Practice Communication Cases aus der Entertainment-Industrie

Chris Thilk, Filmvermarktungsblogger aus Chicago und Betreiber des Weblogs http://www.moviemarketingmadness.com/, hat mir auf meine Interviewanfrage mit sehr interessanten Antworten Response gegeben.

How do you define Web 2.0?
Pretty broadly, actually. I think Web 2.0 is simply being able to do things on the internet as opposed to Web 1.0 which was pretty much solely about information retrieval. Instead of just search a site like IMDb.com, the audience can now create their own sites and content. That’s Web 2.0 to me.

Is it just hype or might it raise to a traditional medium?
It’s very much not hype. Unfortunately the Web 2.0 label gets thrown around in a lot of inapporpriate or crazy ways but the ability to create your own site, to do things like word processing and more online is a radical shift from the days where you had to have a degree in computer science to understand the internet.

How do you separate traditional tools and Web 2.0-based tools for the marketing of movies?
Again, I come back to the creation and participation definitions. A Web 2.0 movie marketing execution is one where the user can really get engaged in the creation of content themselves. At the very least it’s where the end user can grab something like a blog or MySpace skin and use it on their own site.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of tools used for traditional movie marketing and those, used for modern marketing via Web 2.0?
Well the advantages depend on who you’re asking. From the corporate perspective, traditional efforts are the way to ge because they allow the studio to maintain control. But these add little value to the user experience. It’s a trade-off of control for engagement.

Is marketing of movies via Web 2.0 superior in contrast to traditional tools?
I think so simply because by giving people the ability to create their own content or apply materials like countdown clock widgets to their own site makes them a stakeholder in the movie’s success. That means they’re more likely to see the movie themselves and are also more likely to pass on word-of-mouth about the movie.

In addition to the development from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the terms “marketing 2.0”, “PR 2.0” and “publicity 2.0” appeared. How to you explain the second generation (2.0) in these disciplines?
There’s a quote that has been around for a while that says “Your brand reputation is what Google says it is.” Marketers need to come to the realization that with the democratization of communication tools such as blogging software and photo/video sharing, their corporate reputation is now in the hands of the public. People doing brand/company/product research may not start with the corporate website but will instead search for that brand/company/product using a search engine. That means whatever comes up on that first page of results is going to influence opinion as much as – if not more – than the corporate messaging.

Which consequences has the second generation of marketing, PR and publicity for movie advertisement?
Online buzz for a movie like Transformers, Spider-Man 3 and 300 started a year or more before the movie’s release date. That’s well ahead of even the teaser aspects of a studio-run marketing campaign. Therefore it’s with these original reports and announcements that people are going to start to formulate their opinions and attitudes about the movie.

How does Web 2.0 influence traditional movie marketing?
It makes everything that’s done in the traditional sense open to critiquing that movies just five or six years ago never had to deal with. Everyone can register their opinion on a poster or trailer and those opinions are then read by others, who post their opinions and so on.

Theories describe that appearing modern marketing tools only coexist to traditional marketing tools. Do you think that movie marketing through web 2.0 could replace traditional movie marketing, advertising, PR and publicity, or will these strategies and their tools coexist?
I think traditional efforts will continue to exist, only because there needs to be some official marketing campaign. Web 2.0 is largely reactionary in nature. While it produces content on its own, there needs to be something driving that. It comes back to what Malcolm Gladwell said at one point, that blogs need the New York Times to exist. That’s largely true in that traditional journalism and marketing is the starting point for the bloggers and online opinion makers.

Which target groups do you define for modern and traditional movie marketing?
A while ago I was watching TV with a friend of mine and we saw a commercial for 300. I said I was looking forward to it and he said he’d never seen it before. This goes back to how early in the process online buzz starts. Modern marketing efforts are going to draw in the intensely wired crowd, but traditional advertising still has a place in appealing to those who don’t subscribe to hundreds of blog feeds and such.

How should movie marketers who use Web 2.0 communicate with their audience?
It’s all about enabling the conversation. By providing things like embeddable widgets or video marketers can maintain some form of control over the message but not necessarily the presentation. Providing online writers with the best tools available in order to spread the word of the movie is really the ultimate Web 2.0 play and can have a tremendous impact on the word-of-mouth generated for a movie.

Do you think that the success of weblogs as well as pod- and videocasts goes along with changes in the target groups?
Absolutely. We’re at a point where a larger than ever percentage of the online audience is able to experience rich media like this and the adoption rates have followed that precisely.

Can bloggers, pod- and videocasters reach the importance of journalists?
I think they not only can but they have. As I said, bloggers are talking about a movie a year out from its release. Mainstream media journalists often aren’t talking about a movie until just a few months before it comes out or, in the case of reviews, not until the day the movie is released. That gives them tremendous power in terms of shaping opinions.

The attention to user generated content/advertising for films increases permanently. What are advantages and disadvantages of these active audiences?
The advantage is that you’re enabling the audience to engage and play with the brand in a fun way. The downside – for the studio and sometimes the audience – is that sometimes some of those people just want to exercise their own negativity and not contribute in a meaningful way to the conversation.

How should movie marketers intercept a negative buzz? Can they change the buzz from negative to positive?
The best way to intercept negative buzz is to be listening in the first place. Most bloggers want to get the story right and don’t have a personal axe to grind so if they get a story wrong or pass along incorrect information they’re more than happy to correct it. If the buzz is going to be bad about a movie, though, the best thing the studio could do is to find a way to correct any mistaken impressions. That could take the form of giving the blogger some sort of exclusive access or inviting him or her to a screening to show off the finished product. Even if there’s no way to “correct” a negative story, though, it’s extremely important for executives to engage with bloggers and make themselves available for questions. Doing so gives the blogger a resource to turn to so that, instead of running a false story, they can check the facts and get the story right.

How can movie marketers use digital word-of-mouth marketing and user generated content/advertising for their products?
I think one of the best things that could be added to a movie website is a real-time snapshot of the oline conversation. By linking out to the people who are talking about the movie it makes the website – and by extension the movie itself – much more a part of the online community and not an island in and of itself.

Could the crises in Hollywood in the late 90s and beginning of the 21st century also be explained by changes in the traditional marketing, or are they just caused by digitalisation and internet piracy?
I think it can be explained by a lack of understanding of the need for a paradigm change. The invention of DVDs, coupled with the rise of citizen means that the traditional business models in Hollywood (theatrical release, followed by second-run theaters, followed by home video) were broken down. Traditional marketing has been affected by this because those efforts counted on, to a large extent, the fact that media consumption choices were fairly limited. Now, with TiVo, MP3 players, video games and so much more, it’s increasingly difficult to effect the behavior of a mass audience. That means traditional marketing is still in existence but its effectiveness is ebbing.