Viral Online Movie Marketing

How do you encourage the spread of a virus?

Gordon Paddison is an interactive marketing pioneer in the entertainment industry. He launched and managed over 200 global entertainment campaigns across New Line Cinema’s five business divisions. He was also credited by director Peter Jackson as one of the key executives in marketing “The Lord of the Rings” film trilogy.

Awarded Variety’s “Integrated Marketer of the Year Award” in 2005, he was selected as one of the top 100 people in show business by Entertainment Weekly’s “IT List” and named one of Variety’s “Digital Dozen”—individuals who will shape a new wired Hollywood. At the time of this interview, Mr. Paddison was leaving New Line Cinema to launch his own consulting firm, Stradella Road, advising clients in digital media strategies.

eMarketer: Tell us about this idea of leaking footage for soon-to-be-released films ahead of time. What goes into this decision process as to whether or not to do it, and when and how to do it?

Gordon Paddison: Well, it depends. First of all, you have to decide what type of product you’ve got. So, what’s happened now is everybody takes footage and throws it online like crazy. And that’s not always the best example.

You need to build awareness in some structured way to try and drive toward momentum to get people to go to the theater. So footage is often used. The proper way is to find the message that will resonate in this specific forum.

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eMarketer: Can you walk us through a scenario?

Mr. Paddison: OK. So before they’re distributed to all the national and regional press outlets, we’ll take all the clips and we’ll distribute them. We’ll basically then strike deals with AOL, MSN, blah blah blah, and say, “OK, we have a 2-minute clip that we’d love to give you based on this,” and then you generally get a homepage or head-of-the-entertainment-section coverage on those clips before they break wide. So it’s a good way to start the campaign.

Now, simultaneously you might say, OK, we’ve got two or three other clips that we could do. Would it make sense to be on iVillage? Is there something with a promotional partner? We did a whole thing with Mercedes-Benz on “Sex and the City,” where we used these clips in specific things. I broke them on AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, and I can’t remember where else. And then we gave them all also to Mercedes-Benz right afterward, and they put them on this large “Sex and the City” microsite they did on mercedes-benz.com.

You can look at each of your potential demographics, look at your film footage, and then of course also you can put stuff on YouTube. But the thing is—and here’s an instance in social media—on YouTube for “Sex and the City,” we created a channel.

eMarketer: You’re describing a very deliberate and targeted approach as opposed to a scattershot viral approach, which is what happens sometimes with film marketing.

Mr. Paddison: Everyone uses, and it’s not inappropriate to use, the word viral, but constantly people are going, “We need something viral.”

And it’s like, “Well, what you need is something that makes sense and that is good for the product.”