Selling a movie used to be a snap. You printed a poster,
ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads.
Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired. The dark art of
movie promotion increasingly lives on the Web, where studios are playing a wilier
game, using social media and a blizzard of other inexpensive yet effective online
techniques to pull off what may be the marketer’s ultimate trick: persuading fans to
persuade each other.
The art lies in allowing fans to feel as if they are discovering a film, but in truth
Hollywood’s new promotional paradigm involves a digital hard sell in which little is
left to chance — as becomes apparent in a rare step-by-step tour through the
timetable and techniques used by Lionsgate to assure that “The Hunger Games”
becomes a box office phenomenon when it opens on Friday.
While some studios have halted once-standard marketing steps like newspaper ads,
Lionsgate used all the usual old-media tricks — giving away 80,000 posters, securing
almost 50 magazine cover stories, advertising on 3,000 billboards and bus shelters.
But the campaign’s centerpiece has been a phased, yearlong digital effort built
around the content platforms cherished by young audiences: near-constant use of
Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live
Yahoo streaming from the premiere.
By carefully lighting online kindling (releasing a fiery logo to movie blogs) and
controlling the Internet burn over the course of months (a Facebook contest here, a
Twitter scavenger hunt there), Lionsgate’s chief marketing officer, Tim Palen,
appears to have created a box office inferno.
Analysts project that the “The Hunger Games,” which cost about $80 million to make
and is planned as a four-movie franchise, could have opening-weekend sales of about
$90 million — far more than the first “Twilight” and on par with “Iron Man,” which
went on to take in over $585 million worldwide in 2008.
Along the way the studio had to navigate some unusually large pitfalls, chief among
them the film’s tricky subject matter of children killing children for a futuristic
society’s televised amusement. The trilogy of novels, written by Suzanne Collins, is
critical of violence as entertainment, not an easy line for a movie marketer to walk,
even though the movie itself is quite tame in its depiction of killing.
“The beam for this movie is really narrow, and it’s a sheer drop to your death on
either side,” said Mr. Palen, during an unusually candid two-hour presentation of his
“Hunger Games” strategy at the studio’s offices here last month.
A built-in fan base for “The Hunger Games” certainly helps its prospects. More than
24 million copies of “The Hunger Games” trilogy are in print in the United States
alone. About 9.6 million copies were in circulation domestically when the movie’s
marketing campaign intensified last summer, so Lionsgate’s efforts appear to have
sold the book as well as the movie.
Lionsgate has generated this high level of interest with a marketing staff of 21 people
working with a relatively tiny budget of about $45 million. Bigger studios routinely
spend $100 million marketing major releases, and have worldwide marketing and
publicity staffs of over 100 people. The studio has been able to spend so little largely
because Mr. Palen has relied on inexpensive digital initiatives to whip up excitement.
The irony is that all of this may still not be enough to save Mr. Palen’s job. In a
corporate twist on “The Hunger Games,” Mr. Palen is being forced to fight for his
professional life following Lionsgate’s acquisition in January of Summit
Entertainment, which controls the “Twilight” franchise. That means Lionsgate now
has two marketing chiefs, and there is only room for one.
Mr. Palen declined to comment on his job status, but it is clear that Ms. Collins is
perplexed at the possibility of a future without him. “He’s a generous collaborator,”
she said in an e-mail. “His work is so exceptionally good, I rarely had any notes. If he
keeps his e-mails, he must have about 50 from me that say, ‘That looks amazing!’ ”
Early promotion for “The Hunger Games” started in spring 2009, when Mr. Palen
flew to New York to meet with publicity executives from Scholastic to learn about the
book franchise. Rubber didn’t hit the road, however, until last March, when the
Lionsgate team, including Julie Fontaine, executive vice president of publicity,
started methodically pumping out casting news via Facebook.
They assigned one team member to cultivate “Hunger Games” fan blogs. Danielle
DePalma, senior vice president for digital marketing, drafted a chronology for the
entire online effort, using spreadsheets (coded in 12 colors) that detailed what would
be introduced on a day-by-day, and even minute-by-minute, basis over months.
(“Nov. 17: Facebook posts — photos, Yahoo brand page goes live.”)
One important online component involved a sweepstakes to bring five fans to the
movie’s North Carolina set. Notably, Lionsgate invited no reporters: The studio did
not want consumers thinking this was another instance of Hollywood trying to force-
feed them a movie through professional filters. “People used to be O.K. with studios
telling them what to like,” Ms. DePalma said. “Not anymore. Now it’s, ‘You don’t tell
us, we tell you.’ ”
Last summer, the Lionsgate team, including Nina Jacobson, a producer, and Joe
Drake, then the studio’s top movie executive, started debating how to handle the
movie’s subject. The usual move would have been to exploit imagery from the games
in TV commercials. How else would men in particular get excited about the movie?
But Mr. Palen was worried.
“This book is on junior high reading lists, but kids killing kids, even though it’s
handled delicately in the film, is a potential perception problem in marketing,” he
said.
One morning, he floated a radical idea: what about never showing the games at all in
the campaign? Some team members were incredulous; after all, combat scenes make
up more than half the movie. “There was a lot of, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t see
how we can manage that,’ ” Mr. Palen recalled.
Eventually, he prevailed. “Everyone liked the implication that if you want to see the
games you have to buy a ticket,” he said. Boundaries were also established involving
how to position plot developments; in the movie, 24 children fight to the death until
one wins, but “we made a rule that we would never say ‘23 kids get killed,’ ” Mr.
Palen said. “We say ‘only one wins.’ ” The team also barred the phrase “Let the games
begin.”
“This is not about glorifying competition; these kids are victims,” Mr. Palen said. A
few months later, when a major entertainment magazine planned to use “Let the
Games Begin” as the headline on a “Hunger Games” cover, Ms. Fontaine, traveling in
London, frantically worked her cellphone until editors agreed to change it.
In August came a one-minute sneak peek, introduced online at MTV.com. People
liked it but complained — loudly — that it wasn’t enough. “We weren’t prepared for
that level of we-demand-more pushback,” Mr. Palen said.
The footage did include a Twitter prompt through which fans could discover a Web
site for the movie, TheCapitol.pn. (The Capitol is where the Hunger Games take
place.) The site allowed visitors to make digital ID cards as if they lived in Panem, the
movie’s futuristic society; more than 800,000 people have created them.
October included another Twitter stunt, this time meant to allow those ID makers to
campaign online to be elected mayor of various districts of Panem. November
marked the iTunes release of the main trailer, which received eight million views in
its first 24 hours.
On Dec. 15, 100 days before the movie’s release, the studio created a new poster and
cut it into 100 puzzle pieces. It then gave digital versions of those pieces to 100 Web
sites and asked them to post their puzzle piece on Twitter in lockstep.
Fans had to search Twitter to put together the poster, either by printing out the
pieces and cutting them out or using a program like Photoshop. “The Hunger Games”
trended worldwide on Twitter within minutes.
“It was a silly little stunt, but it worked — bam,” Mr. Palen said.
More movie hubs went live on sites like PopSugar, Moviefone and The Huffington
Post in January, which also was the start of a lavish Tumblr blog called Capitol
Couture dedicated to the movie’s unique fashions. Fifty more Web sites coordinated
a ticket giveaway. Capitol TV — movie footage, user-generated “Hunger Games”
videos — arrived on YouTube in February and has since generated almost 17.7
million video views.
This week, remembering it is operating in the attention deficit era, Lionsgate will
introduce a new Facebook game and, separately, a virtual tour of the Capitol in a
Web partnership with Microsoft.
“You’ve got to constantly give people something new to get excited about, but we also
had another goal in mind,” Ms. DePalma said. “How do we best sustain online
interest until the DVD comes out?”
By BROOKS BARNES – NYTimes – March 18, 2012