Getting Movie Ads Moving Is No Easy Task

By: Jennifer Saba The movie industry isn't having an Oscar moment. Attendance is down. Teens aren't responding to the silver screen as much as they used to, and adults are lowering their backsides into comfortable home theater seats instead. None of this bodes well for the newspaper industry, which relies on movie ads not only for dollars but for readership.

Across the board, movie advertising represents roughly 14% of the national category, according to the Newspaper Association of America. (The national category makes up roughly 8% of all newspaper ad revenues.) In 2004, movie advertising brought in $1.149 billion in revenue, versus $1.162 billion in 2003.

Not all markets are treated equally by the studios, of course. Los Angeles and New York are affected even by a slight dip, says Mort Goldstrom, vice president of advertising at the NAA. These two markets are designated "AA" by the studios, the highest ranking. This means that a great chunk of marketing dollars are doled out, for example, to the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. The rest of the top 100 markets fall somewhere in the spectrum from "A" on down.

While a 1.1% drop may seem slight, the movie ad landscape has morphed quickly. "The pie has dramatically changed," says Goldstrom. "The percentage of dollars coming from ticket sales and from theaters has gone down while product placement in movies and merchandising and DVD sales, in particular, have dramatically changed the dollars."

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, in 2004 newspapers got 12.8% of the $30 billion spent by MPAA member studios. That's down from 15.6% in 2000.

It doesn't help that Hollywood often looks down on newspapers. "Studios have long viewed them as a necessary evil," says Scott Carmen, senior vice president/ general manager of Movie Marketplace, the movie research arm of Landon Media Group in Los Angeles. Carmen explains that studio executives ? for the moment ? think that the best possible marketing methods involve trailers: "If that's their opinion, they're gravitating toward TV and online."

But newspapers can still show they are players. As Carmen puts it, "Hollywood is begging for an answer to its problems."

The Orlando Sentinel has been hosting as many promotional screenings it can muster, says Kelly Schwencke, a senior multimedia consultant at the paper. "It reflects well on the studios as a convenience to the community. People go and see the film, and they go tell their friends about it." For Batman Begins, the Sentinel got a local comic book retailer involved. Readers registered to win tickets for the movie and prizes donated by the store. "Basically, we made it an event," Schwencke adds.

In a smaller place like Allentown, Pa., Jason Wilson, national account executive at The Morning Call, tries to go after big-city dollars. "Partnership promotion becomes a huge factor for markets like ours," he says, adding that the studios rank Allentown as a "D" or "F." The newspaper issues a collect-the-tokens game in which readers use a game board located in Thursday's entertainment section to keep track of game pieces. Promotions for Robots and Madagascar, for example, received 1,500 to 3,000 entries. Wilson says he often gets phone calls from the studios willing to set up advance screenings: "The studios would rather give it to those markets that are very active."

Though linage at the Morning Call has dropped this summer, Wilson plans on keeping the programs going to stand ready when ad dollars bounce back. "It has not changed our promotional attitude one iota," he asserts.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis is angling for more movie dollars by increasing its promotional activity especially, as studios are going more national in scope. "They're not hitting the local market like they used too," says Chris Weber, the newspaper's account manager, creative director/movies at the Star Tribune, adding they had to lure the studios in other ways beyond enticing them to up their ads with more colors.

For the past year and a half, the Star Tribune has run 25 big promotions, says Julie Hanken, the paper's advertising sales promotion manager.

"In the years past, the studios would give us tickets to screenings and they would expect us to run the ads for free. We decided to build this up bigger and bring in sponsorships and have this make some revenue for us," she says. The Star Tribune has pulled in roughly $7 million year to date from movies.

Promotions can even bump the Star Tribune from a "B" market to an "A" market. "It varies by movie and studio," Hanken says. Promotions provide a safe haven for newspapers. Studios, she explains, are less apt to pull their ads at the eleventh hour if they are tied in to a promotion.