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JUNE 12, 2006
Movies: This Time It's Personal Studios smile as fans flog flicks with blogs and homemade trailers And so we enter moviedom's silly season. Crashes. Explosions. Sequel-mania. But the dollars involved are deadly serious -- which makes summer a particularly nerve-wracking time for movie marketing executives. Movies have a strict sell-by date, and the supremacy of the opening weekend gross leaves a very tight window to make it all happen. 
What helps these execs, though, is that movies attract a more crazed audience than detergent does. And that creates an arena in which the already clichéed jargon of next-generation advertising -- like "letting your consumers express what the brand means to them" -- actually make sense. In one recent example, what an upcoming movie means to fans led New Line Cinema to change dialogue to better reflect the movie its fans were imagining (more on that later). "What we love," says Erik Flannigan, vice-president of programming at AOL Entertainment (TWX ), which includes film site AOL Moviefone, is when a movie's "promotional support is entertainment in and of itself." AOL recently concocted an interesting promotion for Universal Studios' American Dreamz. That film was built around a very familiar-sounding televised talent contest, so AOL entreated entrants to film themselves singing the movie's theme, preferably in the vein-popping, ultra-overwrought style favored by American Idol contestants. Participants were encouraged to sing "as embarrassingly as possible," says Flannigan. "Of course, some took it very seriously." A teaser for Web surfers promised "so-bad-it's-bad home videos." The winner, from southern New Jersey, scored a mention in the Philadelphia Daily News. (Alas, the promotion did not stop American Dreamz from sinking like a stone.) IDEALLY, A MOVIE STARTS CONVERSATIONS, and now these conversations can be fed back into the marketing machine. Blog search engine Technorati just inked a deal with Paramount Classics to aggregate blog comments about films and syndicate them for the films' Web sites. The service is already up and running at climatecrisis.net, the Web site for the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But some conversations arise spontaneously. Nothing more than an absurd title and premise for an upcoming New Line thriller -- Snakes on a Plane -- were needed to hook a small coterie of film geeks. Snakes, starring Samuel L. Jackson, due out in August, is about a flight in which certain reptiles... well, you've probably figured it out. But fans have obsessed over Snakes to a point where the unreleased film has acquired a rich mythology. A late-May swing through video-sharing site YouTube reveals scads of homemade Snakes trailers, fake "director" interviews, songs, fake music videos, and parodies of parodies, such as trailers for Snakes on an Elevator and Kid on a [expletive] Truck. New Line was so taken by one (invented) bit of online dialogue, in which Jackson twice inserts a 13-letter epithet into the sentence "I want these snakes off the plane," that it was added to the film. (New Line execs are staying mum on Snakes.) By no means does Snakes posit how all movies will be marketed. "I lived through [1999's no-budget horror smash] The Blair Witch Project," one marketing exec wearily recalls. That film stoked word-of-mouth through a mysterious campaign that treated it like a documentary, the success of which proved impossible to replicate. Still, new platforms point to new approaches. In a neat bit of marketing jujitsu, Sony Pictures Entertainment defused Christian dissent over The Da Vinci Code with a discussion Web site, The Da Vinci Dialogue, which also cannily promotes the film. And AOL's nascent social network, AIM Pages, may prove a potent place to further mash up the line between media and marketing when integrated with AOL's content offerings. Says Flannigan: "If you get to express yourself, you might end up putting together something frankly more compelling" than studio ads. You might even create marketing that's more compelling than the movie in question, à la AOL's American Dreamz contest. But then, ads that are better than the films they promote is just another time-honored tradition of summer. For Jon Fine's blog on media and advertising, go to down.hzvt.com/innovate/FineOnMedia  By Jon Fine
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