2011 Predictions – How B2B marketing online will be just like going to the movies

According to a UK Government report, file sharing pirates are costing the film industry around £12 billion per year in lost revenues on games, software, music and video. If we focus on video, there are now several ways you could watch a film without visiting the cinema, buying or renting the DVD:

• Watch online through a number of the streaming websites
• Download via a “torrent” website using peer-to-peer file sharing

This is also excluding the more traditional method of buying a copied DVD smuggled from some warehouse in the Far East. TorrentFreak, a weblog that covers the popular BitTorrent file sharing protocol even has a top 10 of the most pirated movies of 2010:

So, how are the movie studios responding?

After it came and went in the 1970s, have you noticed how 3D has re-emerged as part of the movie-going experience? One obvious motivation must be as an answer to the question:

• “How can we make the cinema experience unique and unrepeatable at home?”

(Given that 3D televisions are in their infancy and pirating a 3D film would be very hard)

The increasing use of 3D is one tip of an iceberg of a trend:

• Marketing films is now not just about the film, but about promoting engagement with the film across different communication channels both before and after the viewer watches the film.

The success of the Blair Witch Project in 1999 – which used online video as part of a viral marketing campaign – showed the potential for promoting films using marketing channels other than the traditional television and print campaigns. In that case, the films grossed $248,000,000 against a modest final budget estimated between $500,000 and $750,000.

However, today’s films go beyond that to:

• Engage with viewers on multi-channels in specific ways that suit that each channel.

In the case of Inception – a film based on a mind/reality storyline – the film had a number of engagement touch points both for the film and DVD release. It’s not even worth distinguishing between these two as the marketing is increasingly about the total lifetime value of the viewer, not solely about one-off purchases during this lifetime.

The studio Warner Bros. – as you might expect – setup a website promoting the film (http://inceptionmovie.warnerbros.com/dvd/) where visitors could find out more about the film, watch a trailer and download posters and computer desktop backgrounds. However, more than this, they setup a number of microsites with online games that tie-in with the themes of the film:

• http://www.inceptionminutemazes.com/
• http://www.inceptionteam.com/

In conjunction with these, the Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/#!/inception?ref=ts) is both well designed and has interactive features that really engage. Facebook has a huge gaming community, so the 'Mind Crime' game was excellent for promoting the film virally.

Supporting these online activities were a couple of mobile apps, the most notable of which used the location, time and audio abilities of the iPhone to allow the user to unlock different parts of the app depending on what they were doing, what time of day it was and how much background noise there was. This makes them really feel part of the overall experience through an integrated, expanding augmented reality.

With the DVD release, the studio took an even more multi-channel approach using SnapTags (specially designed 2D icons carrying information that can be unlocked when a user snaps a picture of the icon on their smartphone) to make the marketing campaign for the release more viral. Special SnapTags were hidden in Inception television adverts, on web pages, on posters and more. Viewers snapped the tag with a mobile phone camera and then texted or e-mailed the photo to receive weekly special content, such as video clips.

More content was added each week. For example, snapping a tag from the Inception Facebook Page, gave access to a brief video clip of director Christopher Nolan discussing some of the shots used in the film.

And what’s this got to do with B2B marketing?

With the ongoing increase in internet usage and rapid expansion of social media and mobile Internet, in 2011 there are now many more channels on which your customers can:

• Talk about your business, services or products
• Engage with you – either pre-sales, sales or support
• Find out about you (and your competitors)

So, what can we learn from the movies? Well, the lessons from the likes of Inception are:

• Your communication over each of these channels should interact with customers in a way that is appropriate to that channel
• Given the multi-channel environment, it is vital to have an integrated strategy to avoid a fragmented approach
• Content is king – what you deliver over each channel has to be worthwhile for the receiver otherwise you may be undoing positive promotion on other channels

This may seem daunting, but like the “extractors” in the film Inception, Marketecture is happy to act as your guide through the multi-channel maze…