beneficial on the margin
Mark Cuban challenged readers a few days ago to come up with a strategy for attracting more people into theaters. In the original post, he pointed out that studios often spend more money on marketing on a per-viewer basis than they spend on the price of admission. Cuban owns his own theater chain as well as a distributor, so presumably his organization gets the full ticket price, unlike distributors who take a cut of the box office, but still this is a poor business strategy. (The major studio/distributors make the biggest chunk of domestic money from DVD sales, so the marketing blitz that surrounds theatrical releases largely serve to create buzz for the DVD.) For someone like Cuban, who produces movies for niche audiences, he can’t rely on a hit or two floating the rest of his movies.
Today, Cuban posted a follow-up. He is impressed by the response, but disappointed with the suggestions. Some he has already floated, like discounting multiple versions of the same film. When he spoke at the RTF department this spring, he discussed how his day-and-date release schedule might eat into box office sales, suggesting that more folks might see Bubble in the theater if the DVD was discounted with the ticket price. I’ll let readers read the rest of the suggestions, but one gave me a good chuckle, creating a tagging system for releases to harness Web 2.0 social networking mojo. Cuban says “The problem is that its a downstream idea. It works in response to something that is working well.” This sounds about right, but I also think that tagging is mostly successful for sharing content in the same context. If you’re online it’s good for sharing stuff online, but not for getting groups of friends to go to the theater.
It’s worth mentioning that this idea has already been implemented to a certain extent. Bside is an independent film distributor that uses social tagging to find what films audiences respond to. I was skeptical of the idea when I met Bside’s founder Chris Hyams at a party last year. I sort of chortled at the idea of tagging films, since it seemed like everyone was applying tagging to a variety of different problems. At that time, however, I was barely using del.icio.us – which is probably the paragon of tagging systems – and clearly I’m a heavy del.icio.us user. (Actually, my conversation with Chris convinced me to give del.icio.us a second look.) What Bside does is creates folksonomic social network systems for film festivals, where festival-goers can go online, share thoughts about the movies they see, and categorize them as they see fit. This helps Bside determine what markets might be interested in the films at the festival. Since Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures only puts out a few pictures each year, it probably doesn’t have the critical mass of films to support a similar system, but social tagging probably shouldn’t be discounted entirely as a new model for creating interest in movies.
