What does your company have in common with a Hollywood studio? What can you learn from a Broadway show? A lot more than you might think.

By: Vicki Powers

Entertainment marketing may seem a lot sexier than, say, selling insurance or dishwashing detergent, but at heart it’s really the same process, with many of the same challenges. Selling movies and theatrical productions isn’t as simple as running TV commercials and newspaper ads. There’s a diverse set of targets — the consumer audience, influential journalists and bloggers, industry-awards voters — and reaching each can require a completely separate marketing effort.

Also, each constituency influences the others: Audience members choose which movies to attend or shows to see based partly on what the critics and bloggers have to say. The awards voters watch both critical and audience response very carefully in making their selections. And a slew of awards can revive both movies and live shows at the all-important box office.

So you have an overlapping series of influencers, each affecting how the others see the product. Does this sound like what’s impacting your own business? If so, read on for three case studies showcasing how entertainment marketers reach the voters, the tastemakers and, finally, the end users themselves.

The Envelope, Please

For movies to garner awards, they first have to get the attention of the voters. “The essence of this marketing is getting voters to see the product,” says Rick Markovitz, executive vice president at Hollywood based Murray Weissman & Associates. However, extremely strict guidelines from the various groups that dole out major film awards restrict what movie studios can send to voters. The motivation for these restrictions is to try to create a level playing field for independent filmmakers in competing with the major studios.

According to one group’s guidelines, a DVD “screener” must be sent in a package to members with no marketing or branding on the outside. So it can’t be the retail version of the movie’s DVD. In an effort to keep its membership from being overwhelmed with mailings, the organization doesn’t provide its member list to movie studios, so the studios run ads in trade publications to collect current addresses. They ask members to fax in their address and membership card. Over the course of the film industry’s anticipated “awards season,” voters might receive 70 to 80 DVD mailings from different movie studios.

One successful recent campaign season came from an independent Canadian studio in 2005 in an effort to mass market a low budget, powerfully written drama to the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in hopes of securing SAG’s Actor® and other major award nominations. Murray Weissman, founder of Murray Weissman & Associates and a leading entertainment industry publicist, worked with the studio on this project. The key factor involved sending 100,000 DVDs of the movie through the mail to every member of SAG, the union that represents film and television performers nationwide. The entire active membership of Screen Actors Guild votes on all categories for the union’s prestigious SAG Awards.®