Spoiler alert! What you are about to read may not answer all of your questions about effective entertainment PR, but it will tackle one of the most pressing challenges entertainment marketing professionals are having to address in today’s Incessant Information Stream media.
It’s no secret that, particularly American, entertainment production companies are struggling to capture and keep the same audience market share that came so easy a few short years ago. Take the latest Transformers movie for example. Sure, it did well in the States, but nowhere near as well as prior installments in the franchise. Some major production houses just flat out sat out of the summer blockbuster season, preferring to release small budget films throughout the year and hoping to score with quantity rather than quality.
Public Relations & Marketing for a Movie
Could it be that Hollywood is finally beginning to feel the sting from streaming media and on demand television? Pick a cable provider and scroll through the on demand titles. You can expect to find one or two “watch while in theaters” opportunities. Even the concept would have been laughable a decade ago. For years companies turned a blind eye as pirates threw up recorded copies of first run movies online. They didn’t see the competition. But, a generation raised on bit torrents and Netflix certainly understands the value of watching what I want, when I want … WHERE I want.
The days of waiting for a film to come out, of camping out on opening night, and theaters sold out days before a release are starting to see a decline as more consumers opt for other entertainment options.
Producers and film PR firms have fired back by offering longer and more frequent trailers, hoping to entice viewers by offering an extended tease. The new TMNT movie has released three different trailers in the span of a month, and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy just dropped a nearly five-minute block of the movie to give fans a taste.
Where once the teaser trailer was a real art form, snippets strung together into a 90-second emotional roller coaster, now companies are just cutting out chunks of film and throwing it up on YouTube.
Is this the studios giving ground to new media, or do they have another plan up their sleeve? What do you think?
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Ronn Torossian’s Professional Profile on Muck Rack
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Ronn Torossian’s Articles on Entrepreneur
Ronn Torossian’s Blog Posts on Times of Israel
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