Gruvi is an interesting film recommendation Facebook app that lets people signal their interest in a movie, see if their friends are already fans, organize movie outings and even provides additional related content. The service is, according to its founder, gaining traction overseas and is looking to expand to both general audiences and to studios.- Movie and videogame trailers are routinely taken out of the chart of top viral video content assembled by Visible Measure and AdAge for the simple reason that if they weren’t they would continually dominate the chart, pushing everything else down.
- Also on Facebook is information on a cool campaign for the home video release of Inception. Every bit of advertising for that release contained a “snaptag” that, when scanned with a mobile device, unlocked new content, with further scans of more snaptags bringing people deeper into “the dream.”
- Terry Heaton lays out why recent comments by studio executives trying to downplay the importance of Netflix demonstrate an attitude that’s going to cost them the war for people’s entertainment dollars.
- Cinematical rounds up some of the worst critics puns that were included in a movie’s advertising or marketing.
- Both the NYT and LAT have stories about the changing video-on-demand landscape and the fears and worries that are head by studios, exhibitors and others as well as the potential upside for some films that VOD distribution holds.
- Yet another piece, this time in the LAT, about how the end-of-year awards season brings with it a lot of movies that are total downers.
- If you’re interested, Twitter has released the top-mentioned movies of 2010. Some of those titles likely appear on the list because the studios behind them paid for Promoted Trends ads that brought more attention to the titles.
- Along those same lines, I’m not sure if Aris or Andrew is responsible for this line in AdAge’s Book of Ten: Entertainment Marketing trend-round-up for 2010, but this segment is both funny and spot-on:
Twitter is a measurable marketing tool for movies: Whether it was Disney’s launch sponsorship of Twitter’s Promoted Tweets platform for the release of “Toy Story 3,” or Paramount’s successful ability to leverage word-of-mouth to make surprise hits out of low-budget movies like “Jackass 3D” and “Paranormal Activity 2,” Twitter’s promise as a tracking tool may have finally been delivered on this year.
Twitter is an irrelevant marketing tool for movies: Whether it was Universal’s low-grossing “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” appearance as a top trending topic for a full two weeks after it flopped at the box office, or Disney’s ability to translate paid tweets into ticket sales for the under-performing “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Twitter’s promise as a tracking tool may still be inconclusive at best this year.
Chris Thilk 