New Marketing Methods in the Motion Picture Industry

NEW MARKETING METHODS IN THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY

The motion picture industry is one of the largest and most profitable in the United States' economy.   Successful movie franchises like Spider-Man and Twilight have become cultural phenomenons and have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.   Film studios employ ad agencies to promote their products to consumers in an attempt to find the next big hit.   With the changes in technology and society's use of it over the years, advertisers have had to find new ways of reaching their consumer base.   The internet has presented a new medium for movie studios to use in promoting their films.   Over the past two decades, as the popularity and access of the web has expanded, studio executives have decided to appropriate larger portions of their advertising budget to the internet.

As stated in Gentile (2007), “movie marketing is big business, with studios spending about $3.5 billion each year to advertise and promote films.”   Movie studios have begun to shift a large portion of their advertising budgets to the internet, and recently to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.   This change has even resulted in the need to recognize successful and innovative internet marketing campaigns.   The Key Art Awards, which honor advertisers, “have expanded in recent years to recognize the increasing reliance on Internet advertising to reach potential moviegoers.” (Gentile, 2007).   The awards added a new category, “Special Recognition Internet,” which honors achievements in successful internet advertising.   This addition is just a small indicator that times have changed, and movie distributors are now relying more on the internet to the point that their efforts are being recognized on a larger scale.

One specific and interesting way that movie studios have begun to advertise movies on the internet is with the use of search engines.   Google, the most popular search engine on the internet, accounts for 65% of US...