Post co-authored by Sara Giles
Judge us all you want. We (Kelley and Sara Giles) went to see New Moon last Friday and we’re not afraid to tell the whole world in a corporate blog post. Yes, we are also a little bit obsessed.
Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Now that we have zero dignity left, let’s get down to it.
The numbers speak for themselves; New Moon made a killing at the box office, $140.7 million in its opening weekend. The studio undoubtedly owes much of this mind numbingly high number to do with a marketing budget that was likely nearly as much as the $50 million dollars it cost to make the movie in the first place.
The studio also turned to PR and social media in promoting in the film (check out the Facebook and Twitter page), but this was clearly a promotional effort that relied heavily on advertising. (You have a bit of cash to throw around if you can afford a billboard ad that wraps around two sides of a building in Times Square).
Over the weekend, the New York Times’ Brook Barnes examined how PR stacks up against advertising in Hollywood, concluding that:
As studios cut “paid media” (newspaper ads, television spots and billboards) they are leaning more heavily on armies of publicists generating what they call “earned media,” free coverage in magazines, newspapers, TV outlets and blogs.
Now here’s an interesting question – what would a PR-centric New Moon campaign look like if ad budgets were inexplicably slashed? And could PR have achieved the same results as advertising? We may be a little biased, but we like to think it could have based on the specific qualities of this film.
You can’t ignore Twilight-mania, and if you have somehow managed to the only explanation is that you live under a rock. Equipped with an army of “Twihards” ready and willing to disseminate any collateral they can get their hands on to their entire address book, the potential for an explosive PR campaign using both traditional and social media avenues is almost limitless.
Add to that already potent concoction an incredibly newsworthy cast and enough fantasy material for endless urban stunts, and you’ve got an elixir the likes of which most PR pros will never encounter in their careers.
With a built-in audience in place, the biggest challenge the studio faced was attracting an audience beyond the fangirls already lining up in droves. And what better to accomplish that than PR? A Nielsen survey shows that 90% of consumers have some degree of trust in a close friend’s recommendation and almost 70% have some degree of trust in a newspaper article. PR and not advertising has the best chance of positively influencing both of these sources. In fact, we have anecdotal evidence that it worked – neither one of us (Sara & Kelley) had read the Twilight series, and we only watched the movie at the urging of our colleague Lorina (we left off her picture with Rob Pattinson, but don’t worry, she has one).
Lastly, there’s a question of reach – can PR deliver the kind of reach boasted by 1.5 million impressions per day in Times Square? It’s true that sometimes you have a story which will be interesting to your core audience, but you struggle to broaden the appeal to a larger audience. It’s a relatively common problem, but certainly not one faced by New Moon. Its immense popularity left endless opportunities to curtail the movie with the niche interests of different audiences (New Moon and business, New Moon and technology, New Moon and the evolution of film making… you get the idea). A PR-driven campaign has the power to make the movie relevant and interesting to a wide range of disparate audiences – something a billboard ad could never achieve as effectively.
So how about it? Time to give PR a whirl for Eclipse?