Market Research & Testing: Reports from the Frontlines of Movie Advertising

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Frederick Greene

This quarter, in the graduate seminar I teach on movie trailers, I invited a senior executive from Nielsen NRG (part of the Nielsen Group, famous for its ratings measurement and entertainment research) to visit our classroom and speak about the practice, process and marketing promise of research and testing of trailers and tv spots for feature films.

My students and I were shown a detailed, well-organized presentation of the services Nielsen NRG provides, the value of their research to producers and distributors and the sophistication and depth of NRG’s database and analysis. As a class, we were familiar with some of what the presentation covered, since among the readings for the course is an NRG report from 2008, prepared for the underperforming release, The Love Guru, and provided to me by Paramount for the benefit of my students. Clearly, Nielsen NRG has revamped and expanded its analysis, while endeavoring to improve its objectivity, accuracy and nuance.

Although I am not able to share either the report or the presentation in this venue, I did want to break out a few of the findings that struck me as most relevant to the objectives of this site as well as interesting in their own right.

First, the bad news: Movie going is declining, as measured both by number of movies seen as well as by box-office receipts. (A 16 year low!)

Compared to total population, though, moviegoers tend to be younger and more ethnically diverse.

As a general rule, Moviegoing incidence peaks among teens and declines with age. (There’s a reason that so much marketing and advertising is pitched to these audiences! It’s not just gerontophobia.)

Worrisomely, average movie going decreased across all age groups except for older moviegoers (aged 45 to 64.) Males and teens reported the largest declines from last year. (Whether this was a result of unappealing fare, greater competition from other entertainment/media options or both, is unclear.)

With respect to the source of movie information, Television remains, far and away, the most important, with a 76% mention among respondents. (This percentage was not broken down by whether the information came from an advertisement or from programming content, such as an appearance by a talk show appearance or segment on a news/entertainment program.)

Word of mouth came in second, with 46% of respondents describing this as their primary source of information and awareness. (I’m reminded of trailer maker Anthony Goldschmidt’s quip that “trailers have the first word, but the last word is word of mouth.)

Next, 42% of respondents mentioned that they learned about upcoming releases “in theater,” with trailers accounting for 83% of that awareness. More than half of respondents who got their news about a movie ONLINE, watched the trailer. In other words, 35% of respondents mention “in theater” trailers as their primary source of information and awareness about upcoming films. 25% of respondents mention “online” trailers as their source. These are important numbers, no matter how you parse them. Recall too that TV spots are the dominant driver of awareness among TV viewers.

Phew! It’s a relief to know that trailers and tv spots are still the “lead arrow” in movie marketing.

As to where people see trailers, in-theater viewing is dropping, while online viewing is rising. Sure, we might have predicted that, but it’s good to have the numbers. iPad viewing, in 2011, its first year, reached 5%, which was “already at the level of 2010’s Smartphone viewing” numbers. (So, thanks again Apple!)

So, moving from where and how audiences learn about upcoming movies, I wanted to conclude this post by a consideration of what I consider to be the most salutary aspects of this presentation: a confirmation that story, stars, genre and spectacle remain the fundamental appeals of movie advertising. It’s what I tell my students and probably the most intuitive claim we can make about these increasingly dense, visually exciting and aesthetically complicated short-form films.

Frankly, I’m extrapolating from the slides of the presentation and interpreting. But, since the “topline report” that a company like Nielsen NRG provides its clients with after a weekend of testing is a measurement of audiences response to Stars/Title and Materials, I’m comfortable with this claim about the fundamental appeal of stars and story.

On a later slide, the communications achievements of a given film are measured according to responses concerning: Hero/Heroine (characters), Journey (story and setting); Tone (Emotional engagement?) Originality (is it “fresh?”) and Resonance (Happy/sad ending?). When we talk about effective trailers in class and with industry professionals who guest lecture, I hear variations on this five-fold set of communicational priorities.

Characters matter. Visual artistry is all well and good, but without a point of identification and a reason to care, audiences won’t buy in. As Columbia chief David Begelman pointedly remarked, in a conversation with Ray Stark over where to spend money on an over-budget production, “at the end of the day, people only care about other people.” (Perhaps dogs too—especially if they can talk!)

Story matters: Call it a journey or a plot, but trailers and TV spots should make clear that there is one and it’s worth exploring. Tone or emotional engagement. Haven’t we learned from the recent proliferation of books about the human brain that reason and logic are ultimately servants of emotion and feeling? Aristotle identified it 2300 years ago: Catharsis and vicariety are critical to the experience of art and entertainment. Emotion is the engine of good advertising, branding and messaging.

Originality? Even if you think there’s nothing new under the sun, it’s a trailer’s job to make you believe, or hope, that there is. Same but different; original but just familiar enough to be assimilable. That balance is tricky but key. Finally, Resonance, or a way to answer the question, “is this my kind of movie.?” Given the expense of time and money involved in an outing to the cinema, audiences have shown that they want to know what they’ll be paying for.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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BOARDWALK EMPIRE TV SPOTS: Multi-Sensory, Experiential & Somatic

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Frederick Greene

In a recent, soon to be published paper, Dr. Enrica Picarelli (a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Luneburg, Germany) “investigates the multisensory appeal of digital television aesthetics, taking HBO’s promotion of Boardwalk Empire as an example of hyperaesthetics marketing.”

While I don’t want to steal her well-deserved thunder and reveal the dazzling argument she makes and the impressive evidence she marshals, I did want to meditate on the ramifications of her paper, to me as a trailermaker and scholar, as well as a member of the audience.

But first, to contextualize the subject of today’s post, I cite Picarelli’s succinct and compelling description of the trailers, one of which I’ve embedded above:

“The trailers are little more than sixty seconds and present the show in a non-linear fashion, recurring to graphic elements and title cards to introduce the cast and productive team, employing musical cues to lend rhythm to a discontinuous editing. The shot length is brief, getting more compressed as the clips approach the ending. The promos reveal little about the actual plot, but some characters and generic elements are foregrounded, most notably those associated with the gangster lifestyle of the characters played by Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt. Their prominence implies that they will be crucial to the development of the narrative, while the recurring appearance of other actors (such as Paz de la Huerta, Vincent Piazza and Michael Kenneth Williams) and locations (the boardwalk and a supper club) suggest the presence of a large ensemble cast and the period-piece nature of the spectacle. Interspersed among shots of characters going about illegal businesses, are flashes representing scenes of murder, excess and dissolution that set the stage for Boardwalk Empire’s dive into the underworld of liquor smuggling in 1920s Atlantic City.
The trailers rely on appealing visuals and sound to capture the attention of prospective viewers. An amalgam of inputs, ranging from the energetic feeling communicated by the rapid cutting pace of the promos and a blues guitar vamp and solo (from an original song by The Brian Jonestown Massacre band), to nostalgia associated with the sepia tones of selected shots, create a sensorially enticing interface.”

In Picarelli’s study of the show’s first season trailers, its titles sequence and character posters, she finds that “chromatic enhancement achieved through colour grading,” produces a haptic (or tactile) response in audiences, which, not only “confers a distinctive identity” on the program, but reaches viewers where they live, that is, somatically, in their bodies.

Her paper then considers HBO’s partnership with Canadian Club Whisky in order to examine and the “multisensory appeal of the marketing/promotional campaign” and the way it brands the sow “as an emotional, lifestyle event.”

Readers, movie marketers are, as I hope this blog makes clear, energetically engaged in communicating with audiences by every means possible. They’re appealing to your left brain, your right brain, your reason, your emotion, your body and your soul. Happily, a new generation of media scholars (supported by ever more probing studies of reception by psychologists and neuro-scientists) have taken on the task of analyzing their multi-pronged, multi-sensory “appeals” in order to describe the physiological and psychological ways in which audiences are engaged by increasingly interactive, immersive and experiential advertising campaigns.

Audio-visual entertainment and its marketing marketing has always been a realm of sensation, yet advertising theory—most memorably expressed in Ogilvy—has typically characterized the provision of news and information as the key communicational strategy. And while trailer (including tv spots too) analysis, as explained and practiced in my course and on this blog, has focused on the formal components of previews, their various appeals to audiences and the informational content presented, Picarelli alerts us to the revolution taking place in (televisual) media advertising: As Charlie Mawer, executive creative director at Red Bee Media sees it, “’experience’ has now supplanted description as the primary mode of address in television branding” (quoted in TV Promotion and Broadcast Design: An Interview with Charlie Mawer, Ree Bee Media.” Ephemeral Media: Transitory Screen Culture from Television to YouTube. Ed. Paul Grainge. London: British Film Institute, 2011. 87-101).

To elaborate, I defer again to Picarelli:
“Designers are asked to “personify” channels and reach out to viewers, “starting to take the channel out to people, rather than just getting people into the channel.” Among the many strategies that are employed to mobilise the attention of distracted viewers, Mawer stresses the importance of creating seductive interfaces able to “break the physical boundary of the TV screen” and “embody feeling” onto a channel and/or individuals shows. (Grainge, 98)”

We’ve come a long way from the days of “subliminal advertising,” a practice that is legally prohibited in Australia and Britain and subject to FCC regulation in the US. (A broadcasters license can be revoked upon proof of the practice.) But subliminal advertising is addressed at the subconscious mind; not the body and its sensory apparatus (apart from the eyes, which are the conduits for the receipt of such messaging), which now, apparently constitute a new and extraordinarily promising terrain on which the battle for audiences and advertising revenues has been pitched.

It’s a brave new world, as yet unregulated, because so little known or comprehended. For graphic designers, production designers, color technicians et. al. in the industry, days of full, challenging and remunerative employment beckon.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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THE HUNGER GAMES TEASER: A Viral Reading Campaign?

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Frederick Greene

In the :58 teaser for The Hunger Games, there is no explanation of the title, no explanation of the premise, no description of the “world” entered, other than the audio-visual evidence that a female archer is under assault in a threatening and soon to be fire-bombed forest. There’s no introduction of the male narrator or his relationship to the “you,” he encourages and praises. Nor is the significance of the gold MockingJay pin explained, despite its sensuous, extreme close-up presentation, its subsequent bursting into flames, and its ubiquity as the key graphic in the marketing campaign. Indeed, in this spare herald of the film to come, there are no shots of the “reaping,” the Capitol, the training, the competition or the televisual spectacle that readers of Suzanne Collins’ best-selling trilogy will recognize as essential components of the dystopian fantasy that is “The Hunger Games.”

Given yesterday’s (Monday, March 26th) box-office report, I wanted to consider the A/V marketing campaign. The Hunger Games has met and surpassed its distributor’s ample expectations; its record breaking debut is challenging expectations for Spring releases and providing a welcome successor to Harry Potter and the all-too-soon-to-be-concluded Twilight series. I first noticed that whereas the teaser is opaque, the official trailers (#’s 1-3, see below) are explicit about story, stakes, characters and spectacle. This is not a rare or unexpected difference; in fact, it’s typical, although I venture to say that this teaser is especially oblique –especially parsimonious–in its presentation of story information. Why might that be?

A review of comments and twitter posts indicates the existence of an extremely engaged and knowledgeable fan base—evidence of the appeal of Ms. Collins’ books as well as a paradigmatic confirmation of selection bias. (Those who watched the youtube teaser are those most likely to be interested in the movie, invested in the books and eager to engage with others like them.) What was noteworthy about the comments—and admittedly, this is an anecdotal sampling—was the literary discrimination evinced by the authors, who disdained the Twilight books and movies, seeing themselves rather in the mold of J.K. Rowlings alcolytes, passionate about reading and this trilogy in particular, excited about the film yet anxious lest it prove faithless to the source material.

Let’s take a look at the teaser in order to ground our analysis and explication in details from the film text: The Lionsgate logo opens the preview, followed by shots of a forest landscape, with a soundscape built of crickets chirping, mosquitoes buzzing and birds winging through the air. Cue a dull chiming phrase/melody, and the sound of “giant footsteps,” to add the sense of human habitation and looming threat. A series of shots presents a human figure, seen first from the legs down through the underbrush, then from the front, but at a distance, and partially blocked by foliage. Next, she’s seen close-up, but from the back of the head before finally, we see an extreme close-up of anxious eyes. Between the first three shots, the editor has cut to black, but then the edit speed quickens and the cuts are direct, from shot to shot, whether scene of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) running through the forest or a scanning close-up of the golden contours of the MockingJay Pin, which is probably computer generated.

After we see Katniss’ eyes, the voice-over begins. It’s dialogue from Gale (Liam Hemsworth), addressing Katniss: “Kate, listen to me…You’re stronger than they are, you are.” We now see Katniss in a medium shot, striding toward the camera, a quiver of arrows on her back. As Gale concludes, she begins running, and we cut to the MockingJay graphic, gold on black. Returning to the forest, Katniss is now running (shots of her torso alternate with shots of her legs and feet), reacting to a fire-bombing attack. (Falling tree trunks; fire-balls in the branches.) Gale’s narration returns over Katniss’ flight “they just want a good show…That’s all they want,” as Katniss flees against a flaming backdrop, which is match cut to another closeup of the golden pin. “You know how to hunt, show them how good you are,” continues Gale, as Katniss leaps a fallen log, draws an arrow and sends it spiraling toward the camera, and then, as the P.O.V. reverses, we see the arrow fly into the graphic, striking the pin and merging with its iconography (the bird now holds an arrow in its beak) as it bursts into flames.

The title card appears over the fiery pin, the tagline “May the Odds be Ever In Your Favor” above, with the date, March 23rd, 2012 indicated as well as the Twitter hashtag, “whatsmydistrict” in the lower left corner. A four note phrase (identified within comments as Rue’s whistle—and present in all the trailers as a tonal signature) plays as the tagline is replaced by an invitation to become a Facebook fan, with the the Facebook url provided on this alternate or secondary title card.

This teaser is all about anticipation and awareness rather than satisfaction or revelation. Until the title card, a casual viewer would have no contextual cues by which to guess at the movie being advertised. Apart from a heroine in peril, and mention of her strength, skill, and a “show” in which she is to perform, the teaser relies on audience familiarity with the famous novel that’s being filmed to reconstruct the particular scene that’s shown. There is no indication of the time or world, apart from what appears to be a temperate forest and a heroine dressed in contemporary clothes, albeit using a bow and arrow as weapons.

What I admire, as an erstwhile teacher of literature, is the reliance of the movie marketers on the reader fan base to anticipate the film, contextualize the scene and spread the word by their enthusiasm and expectations as well as by their anxieties and criticisms. This teaser seeks to “infect” a population of readers and writers who will take to social media to tweet, post and share with their peers.


ALL OF THE HUNGER GAMES TRAILERS–TEASER & OFFICIAL 1-3

The official trailers address a broader audience, those who haven’t read the books but learned of them from friends and social media, and found themselves in the unenviable position of being late to a generational bonding experience. As such, the trailers are clear and content rich, revealing Hollywood’s realization of a beloved book—its world, its characters—to core fans while appealing to the unindoctrinated by way of genre and spectacle.

I guess, the strategy worked.

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movietrailers101 by Fred Greene is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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