Studios embrace online marketing
Fox campaign targets Christian niche
By Jennifer Netherby -- Video Business, 1/14/2005
JAN. 14 | Television and magazines are crowded with DVD ads for the biggest releases these days, but 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and other studios also have been turning more to direct-to-consumer marketing through e-mail and the Internet to reach consumers more directly and inexpensively.
Fox has been aggressively building its online customer relationships, regularly e-mailing more than 1 million buyers of its TV and movie programming and using those core consumers to get instant feedback on releases. Recently, the studio built an opt-in e-mail database of 6 million active Christian DVD consumers and more than 200,000 congregations to market such family- and faith-friendly films as Love's Enduring Promise and Woman Thou Art Loosed as well as major theatrical releases.
"We've established a credibility with that consumer," said Fox VP marketing communications Steve Feldstein. "It's a symbiotic relationship where they rely on that information to know what is family programming for their family."
Fox also has reached out to other niche audiences through e-mail. For its release last fall of political documentary The Hunting of the President, Fox teamed with MoveOn.org to promote the release to the grass-roots organization's members.
For films such as Hunting, which have miniscule marketing budgets, e-mail blasts to the right consumers can make all the difference. For its release of documentary Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed, about Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm's campaign to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee, Fox will send out e-mails to older members of the national Black sorority that Chisholm belonged to.
"You can directly reach out to a group of consumers that are predisposed toward your product with a direct call to action," Feldstein said. "We find it to be extremely effective for us."
Similarly, Paramount Home Entertainment has sent direct e-mail announcements to fans that lobby the studio for specific DVD releases.
The studio has compiled a list of e-mail addresses of fans that took to the Web to lobby the studio for a release of TV series MacGuyver. The studio will remind them of the series' release on Jan. 25 to get them into stores.
Likewise, Paramount kept in touch with Friday the 13th fans that had approached the studio about the DVD release of those films.
"It helps build relationships," said VP publicity Martin Blythe, who noted that the studio would go back to fans to alert them of future season releases of MacGuyver and other series with a strong online fan base.
"Once they start collecting, they are interested in collecting all of these," Blythe said.
For the February release of TV series Charmed, the studio is posting messages about the upcoming first-season DVD release on Web sites and blogs devoted to the series.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment has created instant message (IM) backgrounds such as one for Lizzie Maguire that users can easily pass on to other friends to download through IM, said VP marketing Gordon Ho. During the holidays, the studio created holiday letters from Mickey & Santa that noted the release of Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas.
The company also revamped its consumer Web site, DisneyDVD.com, so that consumers can more easily search for titles. Users also can do a Memory Lane search, typing in their birth year to find movies that were popular when they were kids.
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