I was chatting this weekend with an Organic alum about the value of entertainment content online. One of the cardinal rules I learned in working with clients like 20th Century Fox is that movie promos have permission to be much much more intrusive into the digital experience than any other form of advertising. In 2004 or so, Organic developed a lot of really aggressive takeovers for the Yahoo homepage, for example, and people tolerated and even embraced this content. Picture Wolverine slashing out from behind the homepage for XMen, and you'll get the idea.A couple of years later, you started to see media platforms leverage movie content as a kind of reverse product placement tool. Google, for example, has partnered with blockbuster titles in Summer 2006 (The DaVinci Code) and 2007 (The Bourne Ultimatum) to promote the launch of Google Maps, Google Earth, etc. In each case, the film content drove interest in trying out new online tools. I'm surprised not to see a major studio-web portal partnership (yet?) this summer.
Now Papa John's pizza is using movie previews to drive traffic to its site, in this case partnering with The Mummy franchise to offer an exclusive trailer. It's a smart relationship given the overlap in their audiences - I guess Adam Sandler wasn't available. Even though the basic value proposition of the web is ubiquity, it shows that exclusivity can still mean something online, particularly for premium content like movies. This campaign would have been even more powerful if the only place you could see a Mummy trailer was on Papa Johns.com
Misha Cornes
Strategists & Planners