When Sony started the teaser campaign for its upcoming May blockbuster Spider-Man 3 earlier this month, the company shelled out roughly $200,000 for a 30-second spot during Heroes and more than $600,000 for a place on American Idol. Despite the hoopla around the first big film of the summer, there was no way Sony execs could guarantee that most of the targeted TV viewers saw their carefully constructed trailers for the film. In fact, they assume most at-home time-shifters simply skipped the pricey promos altogether. Or, like moviegoers, opted for a bathroom or snack break instead.
Not so on the web: Millions of viewers are actively searching for those Spider-Man trailers -- juiced up online with seven minutes of exclusive, high-definition footage. Hundreds of sites link to the material, promote it and rate it. Bloggers are still writing about the clips, and teenagers continue to send links to their friends. It's a buzz phenomenon. And with the web, it's all free.
In the world of online advertising, there's nothing quite like movie trailers. Apple gets upward of 2 million unique visitors a month for the trailer section of its website, which shows promos for everything from The Simpsons Movie to The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Not surprisingly, trailers also pull in large crowds on MySpace and YouTube; they're even a major draw for mobile users.
"It's a top priority for us," says Are Traasdahl, CEO of Thumbplay, the largest online retailer of mobile content. "Our business was 100 percent music, but by the end of 2007, video -- mostly trailers -- is going to be between 8 (percent) to 10 percent. Outside the U.S. market, (that number) is as high as 20 percent."
Hollywood execs resist comparing the viewership of trailers played on television or in theaters to those seen online. However, most agree they're impressed with the response of the online crowd, which regularly seeks out trailers.
"I don't want to speak numbers-wise.... We're trying to get better at tracking it," says Doug Neil, senior vice president of digital marketing for Universal. "Google did a survey last year and said 50 (percent) to 70 percent (of movie viewers) go online to get more info (about a film). A lot of that is watching trailers." Neil goes on to point out that "trailers are one of the primary reasons anyone goes to see a movie."
This spring, as studios gear up for their big summer releases, trailers are going to benefit from the explosion of online video sites and increases in broadband penetration among computer users. Many in the industry are looking to trailers as the savior for the dying 30-second spot -- the traditional way of advertising products and services on TV.
Because of the studios' spare-no-expense approach to trailers, viewers often forget -- or forgive -- that they're essentially watching ads.
"They are the best commercials, and they're terribly expensive to make," sometimes up to several hundred thousand dollars each, says New Line President Bob Shaye, who is also the director of the new release The Last Mimzy. (Official trailers can be seen on the film's website.) "They're fun, have enticing casts and big production values. It's not just a lot of cars going around curves."
Berge Garabedian, who founded the niche fan site JoBlo.com, gets about 100,000 unique visitors a day -- viewers who go to the site specifically to watch trailers. Studios now kowtow to JoBlo's visitors: When viewers complained about the clips playing automatically or being surrounded by banner ads, nearly all the studios stopped the practice for trailers appearing on the site. To further keep viewers happy, studios "took off the volume or added user controls," says Garabedian.
While it might seem like a losing proposition for a guy like Garabedian to post free ads for movie studios as his mainstay content, it's actually incredibly good business. Universal's Neil recently worked with Garabedian to post a "hosted" trailer for Dead Silence, where the film's producers introduced it specifically for JoBlo's audience. Hundreds of other sites linked to it, which boosted traffic and let Garabedian raise his ad rates, which are based on unique visitors and pageviews.
"We always try to premiere a trailer on a site that can offer some promotion in exchange," says Neil. "We'll do a media buy supporting the message that the trailer is available, or we'll do a special segment on a show like Access Hollywood."
But for all the cost of making trailers, there's another important rule: Money and high production values don't trump engaging content. Movie trailers work even for films without big stars.
"We had pastors from Duluth blogging about Jesus Camp and directing people to the trailer," says Jeff Reichert, the head of publicity and marketing for Magnolia, a distributor of independent films like Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and The World's Fastest Indian. "For us, trailers on the web are certainly cost-effective. We just did an exclusive premiere of The Host with MSN, and it didn't really cost us anything and we got tons of viewers."
He says the same rules of promotion should apply to any product: You should be able to easily find a niche group and sell directly to its members.
"People are talking about things that are important to them on their blogs," Reichert says. "Targeting is really great." Then, as long as you've got an ad worth talking about, the internet should be able to take it from there.
