Cubans Challenge
Software entrepreneur turned billionaire turned media mogul Mark Cuban is fresh out of ideas on how to promote a movie economically. He describes in his blog how the major Hollywood studios will spend in the neighborhood of $10 per ticket sold on opening weekend to market a movie, hoping to make it up in the long run. Currently Cuban markets like the big spenders in Hollywood, with TV and print ads, viral marketing campaigns on the internet, sending the stars on talk shows, etc. However he also adds the uphill challenge of trying to convince theater owners to show the film at all, while he simultaneously releases the DVD for some features.
Rather than bring in teams of marketing experts, he turns to his blog fans. In his latest post The Movie Business Challenge, he solicits ideas…
So if you want a job, and have a great idea on how to market movies in a completely different way. If your idea works for any and all kinds of movies. If it changes the dynamics and the economics of promoting movies, email it or post it. If its new and unique, i want to hear about it. If its a different way of doing the same thing you have seen before, it probably wont get you a job, but feel free to try.
Perhaps Cuban didn’t anticipate the level of response he got, but 3 days into the blog post, the comments have grown to over 800. These are no short ‘me too’ comments, but full on essays. Over 190,000 words spanning more than 400 pages, according to my word processor. Many answers to his questions are pretty predicable such as free babysitting, lower prices, better popcorn. Some answers are more creative than others. I can’t even say that I’ve read them all, there are simply too many of them.
Mark Cuban can take away a few things from this insane response to his proposal.
- Some good ideas for marketing movies, as he was searching for.
- Figure out how to turn a hot button issue like this into advertising for his latest movie. If only he had thought to have all the commentators focus on promoting one of his current films, the gears would already be turning.
- Take a second shot at creating a new TV reality contest show, The Marketeer, featuring the top 12 posters from his blog comments all competing for the job. Each team gets a movie marketing project for one of Cuban’s upcoming Magnolia Pictures films, and the opening box office ticket sales determines the winner. This one might just work better than simply giving away one million dollars as in The Benefactor
And that is how you promote a movie without the million dollar ad budget.