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Number
37: January 28, 2004
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This week in Katydid:
Everybody
Loves a Winner
Yesterday kicked off our national horse race. Every station broke into
regular coverage to carry the story. The cable news channels, CNN,
MSNBC, and FOX, ran lead stories. In the next few months, every American will spend
many hours
researching their pick and debating the merits of their candidates with
friends and family.
Oh, and the first Democratic Party primary election was held
yesterday, too.
I am referring, of course, to the Oscar® nominations for the
76th
annual Academy Awards®. To say that there will be a media blitz from
the studios would be an understatement. However, there are a few
wrinkles this year for America's largest export – entertainment.
In years past, every studio saved their most prestigious films for
December release in order to have them fresh in the mind of Oscar
voters. Some studios opened their films for one weekend in L.A. or N.Y.
only to open them again for wide release in January or February during
voting.
This meant that terrible films came between Thanksgiving and
Christmas, and the very worst films were dumped in January (i.e.,
Butterfly Effect). A movie could be nominated in February and seem to
open the following weekend. The studios wanted to draft off the nomination
buzz.
"From 1991 to 2001, the average increase in box office revenue
for a best picture winner from the day it was nominated until it
received the Oscar was 14 percent, or $19.2 million, according to
Nielsen EDI, which tracks domestic ticket sales. The average increase in
box office revenue after a film won best picture was 11 percent, or
$15.1 million." (NYT)
This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences moved up
the Oscar ceremony from March to February 29th in order to improve ratings and to
be more relevant to the awards 'season'. This made a mess of studios'
marketing. They all had to move movies earlier in the year, which is why
you have missed so many good movies lately.
The domestic marketing budget for a major release can range from
one-third to one-half the production budget. For smaller films, the
marketing budget can be many times the original production budget. Lost
in Translation cost $4M to make and $6M to market in 2003. In contrast,
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King cost
$94M to make and $50M
to market. Both studios spent millions more to get nominations, and now
they will spend still more now that they have been nominated for Best
Picture.
For the first time in eleven years, Miramax did not place a Best
Picture nominee. Cold
Mountain, the obvious choice, may have been
overlooked in the glut of contenders. It also may have been the victim
of a backlash against Miramax for their aggressive marketing. There's
also a chance it was squeezed out by a more clever marketing campaign.
Many had written off Seabiscuit as a contender because of its release
early in the year. However, Universal Pictures timed the release of the
Seabiscuit DVD with the Oscar balloting. This pushed the movie top of
mind for the voters without looking like a deliberate attempt to garner
nominations. In fact, it gets around a ban on promotional copies of
movies called screeners. These screeners were VHS or DVD copies of
current films that used to be distributed by the studios to Academy
members. They were banned because of concerns about piracy. But the strategy
seems to have worked.
For this reason and because of the compressed Oscar voting period,
many studios are considering opening films in May next year and timing
the release of the DVD with Oscar season.
So, why all the fuss? Sure, they want to win to make more money, but
why does winning an award make such a difference to us?
It could be that nominations recognize success. Four of the five Best
Picture nominees rank in the top fifty films by gross box
office. Four
of the five nominees have made a profit. Three of the five have more
than doubled their production and marketing budgets. Four of the five
were critical favorites ending up in numerous top-ten
lists. Still,
if that's the criteria many other films might have made better selections.
In fact, the Academy's history of mistakes is legendary.
Citizen Kane, considered by most critics as the best film of all
time, won one
Oscar for Best Screenplay. In three consecutive years, Do the Right
Thing, Miller's Crossing, and Thelma & Louise were not even
nominated for Best Picture.
Therefore, the clamor over Oscars has nothing to do with popularity,
critical acclaim, box office performance, or artistic merit. It's more because we like to be right.
If it didn't exist, we would create it. Public interest in the Oscars
drove their success. The current marketing efforts merely try to keep
stoking the fire. But for the studios it's about as predictable as
buying a lottery ticket – and about as strong an investment.
Awards spark a national debate. In fact, it doesn't matter at all who
wins – try to remember which picture won last year or the year before –
there just has to be a winner. Everyone can have an opinion and it's
just as much fun (if not more so) to disagree as it is to agree. We get
to complain, harangue, and pontificate about our favorites and we get to
be right either way.
We get to be right because we're debating about an art form and no
matter how objective you might feel in your arguments, it all gets down
to subjective criteria. A movie like In America that I might find
profoundly moving, might seem melodramatic to another viewer (they'd be
wrong).
I suppose we could have a panel made up of psychiatrists and film
critics and they could rank films according to Myers-Briggs
profiles.
However, our way is much more fun, feeds an entire industry, and
everybody gets to be right.
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Spam of Worms
I expect a few of my regular subscribers will not receive their
newsletter this week due to the havoc caused by the MyDoom virus and its
variants. If you haven't heard of it, you've probably been affected by
slow web performance. Many ISPs have choked on the high volume of e-mail
and some sites have been down because of it. Many analysts are amazed at
the speed and volume of the spread of this virus.
Preventing the virus
is easy, but already some hackers have modified it in new ways. One
twist is that the hackers are hiding the true file extension by adding a
long list of spaces in front of it, which keeps it from displaying in
the file name field. For this reason, I save attached files to my hard
drive instead of opening attachments directly in the e-mail. That way I
can see the full file name and run a virus scan.
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CAN-SPAM of Worms
MarketingSherpa is one of the best marketing resources on the web.
Recently, they posted an advisory about the CAN-SPAM law, which everyone
should read. One new key: If someone has opted out of your marketing
(remove me), your company may not contact them ever – even if it a
direct e-mail from someone on your staff. This means you should filter
all your outgoing e-mail against your remove list. Easier said than
done.
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Thanks for Reading
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Kind regards,
Kevin Troy Darling
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