After Party: Here’s Who The Oscar Really Went To...

Forget the nominees and the winners. Silver Linings Playbook: Great movie and will have a huge secondary audience. Argo: The plane has left the runway. Beast Of The Southern Wild: Well, maybe you could drive a few more downloads. Django: You already have an installed base in Tarantino fans. The movies that benefitted most from the Academy Awards telecast and surrounding social media buzz are the ones that created the most curiosity. Therefore, they have created the most aftermarket value and deserve the most marketing investment in the days ahead.

So here are the Mark Papia After Party Oscars. The Marks, if you will. I have no categories. Let’s just file them all under “revenue.”

Les Mis: It’s all about timing. I don’t think the Oscar performance from the cast did a lot for getting Les Mis back into theaters or creating secondary market momentum. But Les Mis is long enough and still early enough in its lifecycle to warrant a limited engagement at theaters. If I was marketing Les Mis, I would dominate the review and ratings sites. There’s momentum here. No need to let the car companies take it. Because when I look on movie sites, I see a lot of car ads.

Life Of Pi: “What does it look like?” That has been the driving force behind this movie. It’s still relevant. I would create a campaign that drives awareness of Blu Ray and high-definition downloads. Maybe create an HD mobile ad. Use technology to highlight the technology in the aftermarket.

Lincoln: Daniel Day-Lewis had his wife on one arm and author Doris Kearns Goodwin on the other. I would promote the secondary market release of Lincoln on book review sites, high-end movie blogs (Film Comment) and position it as the history lesson and psychological study that it is.

Bond: The most tweeted name in post-Oscardom was Adele. The show didn’t just help Skyfall (already out for quite some time)... it’s Shirley Bassey-fueled extravaganza put the whole Bond catalog out there. So? Let’s get the catalog out there again. I’d create Bond social media destinations and advertise them, big, across all the movie review sites.

Having spent years working inside the Variety organization, I’ve been to many award shows in Hollywood and, interestingly enough, the After Party usually turns out to be the main event. Given recent developments in the digital market and digital’s dominance when it comes to certain aspects of movie marketing that will likely be the case with this year’s Academy Awards.

The 2013 Academy Awards: A Stage for "What If" Moments

Next Sunday the Academy Awards becomes a stage for the great “what if” moments of the year. What if Argo wins best picture without a director nomination? What if a young girl beats the big girls for best actress?

Pomp and circumstance aside, here’s another great “what if” scenario. What if you were an entertainment marketing executive that took a break from the business five years ago? I mean a real break. Like, off the grid. You took a five-year trek in the Himalayas. And you re-entered the business on Academy Awards night, 2013. I’m going to argue that in terms of movies and opening theatrical movies, not much has really changed. But after that, let's look at three things that would completely shock this poor man or woman:

1.  Viewer sentiment owns the product: The Internet and social media now completely rule everything that happens after the opening weekend. Two of the best picture nominees (Silver Linings, Zero Dark Thirty) rated 90 and above on Flixster/Rotten Tomatoes. Both of those movies don’t fit the Hollywood model at all. Both followed more of an arthouse build strategy.
2. What happens during the ceremony actually resonates. If someone makes an ass of themselves next Sunday night, it will still be talked about a week later. It will be documented a week later. If someone is off the chart charming or gorgeous, it will be all over YouTube for weeks. The actors matter off the stage these days. They prejudice the perception of the film, and as we said, perception is everything.
3. Your secondary market is digital: Whether you want to trot a Les Mis out to a wider amount of screens or if you want to amp up its presence in the secondary markets, digital marketing is option one, and probably option two. That’s because viewer sentiment lives on the review sites like Flixster, and Rotten Tomatoes and on the information sites like IMDB and Yahoo! Movies. If you want to be at the intersection of awareness and judgment, you need to be on these sites.

Other shockers: Billy Crystal is not the host. Ben Affleck has actually become an excellent director and that’s right, people flocked to a biopic about Abraham Lincoln. 

Introducing the Media Property of the Future

I’m about to say something that might be completely uncool. While everybody with access to a keyboard is tweeting and posting about Twitter and Facebook, I’m here to tell you that they are not the media properties of the future. Newspapers are the media property of the future.

Before you write me off as completely insane, hear me out. The key word here is media. I’ve been in print advertising, Internet advertising, advertising media, social media advertising and advertising research. I could say I’ve been in a lot of different media. But it’s time to consider the concept of onemedia. Not social, mobile, Internet, tablet and offline. One media! The properties that are most efficiently poised to embrace and feed this one media are, interestingly enough, newspapers.

Obviously the reason you would call me crazy is the plunge in newspaper print circulation. That’s one way that newspaper content is consumed, and yes, it is on the downturn. I’m going to give you three reasons that this is just a phase in the life of newspapers. These three reasons will show why I believe newspapers are the keystone of the future of media.

Content: One media will depend on two types of content: expert and user-generated. We all have enough user-generated content. But the complexities of global economics, the complete partisan nature of cable news and the ubiquitous nature of UGC are starting to show the need for something more. Everybody has a blog. But not everybody has expertise. Newspapers have the ability to combine both types of content.

Platform: Newspaper content can be served anywhere, anytime, anyplace. I can read the Los Angeles Times online, or in print, in the morning, check my New York Times alerts via mobile at the gym, and then check in with the Wall Street Journal on my tablet device as the market closes. I can comment on stories. I can share them. Look on your Facebook wall today and notice how many posts originate from a newspaper. Do I still sound like I’m crazy?

Commerce: Newspapers are just now starting to find creative and compelling ways to generate newfound, cross-channel revenue, from both local and national markets. Because they are the content, creative and expert engine, they are bringing multi-media programs to market that even include networking events, consumer based industry events (travel, cars. Etc) and other new-content products.

I doubt my thoughts are shared by a lot of Wall Street analysts. But I know they’re shared by a lot of brands, retailers and agencies. Print newspapers may not be preferred by all readers all the time but that doesn’t mean their content has been devalued in any way. It’s a new growth stage for newspapers.One media!

Can Flipboard Revolutionize The Publishing Business?

It just might be the coolest app in a world where cool shows up every minute. It’s so cool that I’ve had conversations lately in which seasoned professionals actually have hypothesized that Flipboard could be the basis for a huge digital content traffic spike, and a platform from which new content can grow. Can it revolutionize the publishing business? It doesn’t need to. Newspapers and magazines will take care of themselves (see my last blog post). And there’s never a silver bullet for a business that has been so radically changed, anyway. Yet, Flipboard is going to be a positive development for print. And here’s why:

Numbers: The last reliable report I heard regarding Flipboard numbers was in mid-December. At that time it was roughly 15 million. It shows the kind of exponential growth that will put it on a track to be a force for tablet devices. Yes, it’s loaded with cool factor. But this cool factor seems to have connected with an insane amount of people who are very thirsty for content. Engagement with the app has increased 10 fold: Users are set to flip more than four billion pages this month, up from the iPad’s monthly average of 650 million.

The Print Mix: Opinion, discovery and photos. Remember photos? Remember news photos? Well, they’re back. Flipboard is a master mix of everything that has been lost in the transition from print to digital. It has shaken the obsession that aggregators have had with blogs that lack expertise and replaced it with an uncanny knack for finding the best-of-the-best by surveying the quirky, newly legit and old establishment of content. And it has great photos!

Business Model: Flipboard is showing every sign of working with publishers to get good content to a tablet audience instead of making readers jump through hoops. Although it started with USA Today, it has had no problem incorporating local content. It has had no problem bringing international content in, as well. It has shown every sign of taking the best from newspapers and magazines to come up with a best-of-breed consumer product. The business model is open, so far.

Bottom line, Flipboard is creating excitement around content, and I can’t remember anything doing that in a long time. Print-to-digital has been a rough run for publishing. I expect digital-to-tablet to be a lot smoother!

From the desk of...

Sellers --

We had a great 2012. How great? I always measure sales team performance against the marketplace. I remember a lot of years in this business when everybody was a genius and everyone was successful mostly because it was hard not to be successful. There was just so much business to be had. But in 2012, it seems like accounts found more reasons to hang on to their money than to spend it. But we gave them reasons. The Internet and its audience gave them reasons. That added up to a great year.

Now we have a very similar playing field. Just because the clock is a week and a few days different than when you last seriously considered generating business, it doesn’t mean the world has changed. It would be nice if it did. But this year will continue to challenge any sales team because budgets are too tight, brand marketers' attitudes are too cautious, and consumer spending hasn’t dramatically recovered enough to change any of those things.

Yet, we need to grow the business. This can, and will, happen. Let’s approach this from a basic “get, keep, and grow” philosophy. “Get” is our business development effort. We will get more new business this year if we present the right advantages to our clients. Start as we always do with our audience. They are engaged, considering purchases, and still finding new ways to interact online. Continue with our ever-expanding ability to target key sections of that audience. You’ll end with an economically efficient way to advertise. Marketers must advertise. They can cut back for a while, but they can’t quit. That’s the basic internet “get” strategy for this year.

Then there are the clients we have already recently attracted. Maybe some of them are considering an even tighter budget for 2010; maybe some of them are on the fence about proportioning their budgets. We need to keep them through a consistent addition of targeting depth and technology. We need to continually show them new advertising technology and execution options. Enhanced targeting? Real-time bidding? These are some of the approaches that can keep a client interested in exploring a bigger budget.

The “keep” element of “get, keep, grow” is really close to a holding pattern. I’d say under 10 percent of our clients fit there. The “grow” strategy is our most important. We need to get into our best clients and find ways to get them to use more properties, consider bigger audience segments, test more products and in short, spend more money. I have rarely seen any client spend more money on Internet marketing and come away dissatisfied. Challenge them to grow. Challenge them to look at the audience that goes unaddressed.

A lot of sales has to do with attitude. Not a false aggression, but an attitude of confidence. Anyone that intelligently sells a quality internet product should have that confidence this year. It might not be a new year in terms of economic conditions. But it is a new start for a confident approach.