Movie Marketing 2.0: How the Social Web has Shaped Hollywood's Campaigning

The Internet has changed communications, both of the personal and corporate variety, to an incredible extent in the last few years. You might even say that the dot-com bust of the late 90's was the point when the Internet was given the boost it needed to become what it now is. The playing field, it seems, needed to be not only leveled but razed in order to the online world to grow into something more collaborative and dynamic from something static and stagnant.

I remember those days quite well. I remember at one point thinking I should keep track of the commercials that included a URL, a number that at the time – around 1996 or so – wound up being quite low. Investigating those Web sites (which took roughly forever on my college computer's dial-up connection) yielded a group of sites that, well, didn't do much. They just sort of sat there, like week-old mackerel.

But one site that I frequented often was the Internet Movie Database. For a movie fan this was just the coolest thing on the planet. Here was all sorts of information on just about every movie ever made, including quotes, lists of actors and more right at my fingertips. And it was updated with current information on movies that had just or were just about to come out. This was so very, very cool for someone who enjoyed obsessing about such statistics.

The first official website for a movie I think I visited was StarWars.com, again back in 1996 or 1997. At the time there were two things happening in the Star Wars universe. The first was the release of the Special Editions of the Classic Trilogy. The second was production of the first of the prequels, what we knew back then simply as Episode One. While I would spend time reading fan-run news sites like TheForce.net and Jedinet.com I always came back to StarWars.com.

For the Classic Special Editions the site hosted short featurettes on what exactly was new or being changed from the original movies for this new release. The one I remember most is “Anatomy of a Dewback,” which looked at how the digital artists added new elements to a relatively sparse original scene. For Episode One I can, to this day, clearly remember the day I pulled up the site and saw a set picture of the Naboo Starfighter parked in its dock, R2-D2 poking his dome out of the back of the ship. It's burned in my mind like when I first saw each of my children, meeting my wife and that one time my college roommate did not leave his usual signal on our door.

Like the rest of the Internet, movie Web sites have evolved quite a bit since 1997. First and foremost there are more of them. Star Wars and Star Trek may have been among the first to have web presences but those are far-reaching franchises that have audiences that, on a Venn diagram, would overlap significantly with those that were first online. In 2007, a movie's marketing plan has a Web site as a no-brainer, something that's a given, and not an option.

Also like the rest of the 'net, the official sites for movies have become more interactive. There's simply more to do on these sites than wait for a Quicktime movie to load (Back in 1997 this involved starting the movie, going to class, spending a while looking at girls on the quad, coming back to your room and only then being able to watch the video. Some of that might just have been me, though.). Now there are items to download (quickly), games to play and opportunities to interact either with the movie's site itself or with the fan base that's been built up around it.

Now movies have not only their official site but MySpace profiles, Second Life premiere parties, podcasts and a host of other features that take advantage of the social web that's developed since the turn of the century. Everyday Internet denizens have taken these tools and are using them to talk to each other and create their own entertainment in a host of forms. Hollywood studios have found (in some instances) that the best way to market to this crowd is to go where the audience already is.

Like just about every other industry, though, Hollywood has yet to find the magic key to marketing in a Web 2.0 world.

Part of that difficulty is built on the fact that no one can quite come up with a definition of Web 2.0 that everyone can agree with and rally behind. Everyone, that is, except me. Perhaps not, but I do have my own internal definition that works for me:

Web 2.0 uses the Internet itself as a platform that anyone can use to create content.

Web 1.0, exemplified by Amazon.com, eBay.com and IMDb.com, was about building large-scale sites that brought in tons of traffic but which did not allow for much, if any, direct interaction with the audience. We could read Web 1.0 sits but couldn't do anything with them. It was about as interactive as the stone tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai and were presented as coming from just as definitive an authority.

Web 2.0 is more like Play-Doh. If we don't quite agree with what is carved into the Play-Doh tablets then we can take it, examine it, grab the points we do like, discard the rest and use the bits we saved in our own creation.

That's because Web 2.0 is built on the idea, exemplified by Wikipedia.com, that we all contain bits of knowledge or perspective that can be valuable to the entire community. Definitive authority still exists (see above re: stone tablets) but we all have experiences that, when shared, give the entire community the wisdom of our experiences. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it a lot of fun to dive into and see what shakes loose? Absolutely, at least if you're me.

So how has movie marketing evolved and adapted to a Web 2.0 environment? Well that's the focus of this book. I'll cover a few key topic areas:

●         Blogs: Their use as an entry point into the online conversation.

●         RSS feeds: Leveling the content distribution playing field.

●         Social networking: You've got 8,000+ friends but what does that mean?

●         New media relations: Working with the new breed of influentials.

●         Trailers: Once only in theaters, now all over YouTube.

●         Posters and key art: Who is really the audience for these one-sheets?

●         Official Web sites: Is it being used to its potential?

●         Public relations/publicity: What role does it play when the audience won't be spun?

●         Online advertising: Peddling your movie where the audience is

●         Cross-media redistribution: If it's a TV spot, what's it doing online?

Now I can opine on these topics (and have, on Moviemarketingmadness.com/blog), offering insights gained from a lifetime of watching movies and being influenced by their campaigns as well as a career that revolves around online marketing. And that would be a very Web 2.0-esque book. Were it condensed into a single blog post, that might be picked up and linked back to from others who would agree with some of my points and disagree with others. But it would all be opinion-based, with a bit of statistics thrown in amidst generous portions of anecdotal evidence.

I'd rather this book serve as a repository for more than just my thoughts, though. So I've reached out to a number of those who are working at major and minor studios to see how they're embracing these online tools and how their approach to the Web has changed over the years.