Online movie marketing

A few days ago there was this article on "5 reasons to market movies online" on iMedia Connection. I had expected a bit more specific movie reasoning in there although I fully agree with the point that Brad is making there. We see them using the internet for a long time already, but that's most of the time limited to the official movie websites with synopsis, trailer, cast & some desktop downloads. Not a lot of them are using the online in a more creative way and as Brad points out: they should.

I remember research we did at Kinepolis when I was still working over there, that showed that 60% – 70% of all people visited Kinepolis actually used the Kinepolis website to get some information related to that visit. I always thought that was a pretty impressive number. And the best of it is that they probably used other online sources too. And as you can see on iMedia Connection, entertainment just is one of the top destinations online so this really all makes sense.

I do think it's changing already and with The Da Vinci Code for instance we actually see some more creative online stuff pop up. You're having the Quest that Columbia is running with Google, you have the Trail that Sony Ericsson is doing (makes sense to see Sony taking full advantages of the movie over it's business units) and I'm pretty sure that we'll see more of this in the coming weeks. Typically with a movie like this, everybody is eager to do something with it. Let's just hope that there's enough advertising in those deals and that it's not just about co-marketing deals. I've worked with distributors for quite a while and that would be my only reservation to all this. It's good that they start to discover the online more than they were before, but it doesn't work on free tickets alone.

I know what I'm going to do. Anybody knows if there's already like an AJAX sort of beta version of what Moviecritic.com used to be doing in the nineties? If not, I think I just might.

If you want to see the full presentation that Brad from iMedia Connection has pulled together on this, you can download it here.