Hollywood marketers are taking note of Twitter after considering that it may have moved the needle on several summer films. The story was first reported back in August by Baltimore Sun, when expected hits such as G.I. Joe and Bruno missed their mark and box office watchers pointed to prolific negative Tweeting about the films. With summer numbers in the can for the most part, Andrew Hampp reports for Ad Age on how film studios and marketers are taking stock of the so-called Twitter effect .
The industry may have had its summer debut of what Twitter can do when Weinstein Company orchestrated an ingenious preview campaign for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds at San Diego Comic Con. The filmmakers arranged a contest for a chance to attend a screening, and to ensure that those who attended were prolific Tweeters ran the contest through Twitter. They also invited celebrities and encouraged them to use the site to post their own micro-reviews after the screening. Tarantino’s film is seen as benefiting overall from positive Tweets in its opening weekend, when it maintained steady sales in contrast to steep drop-offs seen for other summer films. Hollywood Reporter’s Steven Zeitchik even credited it on his blog as the Twitter age’s first success story .
Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno is the downer example of what Tweets can do for Hollywood. The film was expected to ride on the huge success of Cohen’s first film Borat and draw similar numbers. Instead, in total contrast to Borat’s buzz-driven climb to blockbuster status, after a healthy opening day Bruno saw a steep drop. Market research firm 360i studied the Twitter effect on summer films and pinpointed Bruno as the movie with the highest decline in second-day sales and the largest percentage of negative Tweets. That type of evidence no-doubt started turning heads among Hollywood chiefs.
Still, as evident by those Ad Age talks to, Hollywood is reluctant to call Twitter a significant needle mover just yet. One shortcoming is that Twitter and other social media haven’t proven reliable enough to become part of Hollywood s forecasting alchemy, where measuring pre-release buzz usually gives studios a solid opening weekend forecast. Studios use the forecasts to commit to marketing budgets, putting millions of dollars at stake on accurate predictions. As the market researcher at 360i points out, they don’t yet see the value in chasing social networks to include them in their sample size for a given film.
Based on examples to-date most of Twitter’s effect comes after the gig is up for forecasters, and in many cases for film marketers who set up the biggest push for opening day. It can however help studios manage longer term campaign spends as an early signal tool. Twitter also seems to have a greater effect on films that would have relied on word of mouth to begin with, those relying more on consumer buzz than studio bucks. One marketer talking to Ad Age points to District 9, lauding Sony’s use of Twitter in circulating good word of mouth in the modestly budgeted sci-fi film s opening weekend. Ad Age seems to draw that very conclusion from most of those it talked to that for now, Twitter is another word of mouth tool for Hollywood to embrace but not necessarily one to break their mold for how they market films.
In talking about Sony’s successful use of Twitter, Hampp’s article also covers what s shaping up to be a robust fall line-up for Sony Pictures.
Read more at Ad Age {link no longer active}.
