Bringing Out The Faithful

Brandweek, March 27, 2000 by T.L. Stanley

In small-town markets, church-goers or the local Christian stations shot footage of pastors at the box office, buying Code tickets. That, too, made it to TV. Some theater operators put the tickets on sale a month before the movie's release; tickets also were sold through the Family Christian Bookstore chain.

Where to place the limited number of prints became a marketing tactic in itself. Crouch, through the National Association of Broadcasters, looked for stations that aired Christian programming and sold media time to Christian causes. He booked Code in theaters in those areas, and did local TV and radio spot buys. He also used his father's donor lists and matched theater bookings, by ZIP code, with high concentrations of Christians. Media buys in those areas included 30-minute making-of specials that focused on the movie's action and special effects. All ads pointed to the Web site which, as with Blair Witch, played a pivotal role. A dedicated site, theomegacode.com, and crosswalk.com logged 35,000 hits a day around the movie's release. A movie poster was downloaded 200,000 times.

On opening weekend, sell-outs were common, from heartland markets like Oklahoma City to major metros like L.A. People who had not been in a movie theater in years--or ever-- turned out. At no time in the 60-year history of Christian filmmaking had a movie done so well; product rarely even gets theatrical release, instead confined to Christian film festivals, church screenings and direct-to-video.

As with Blair Witch, there has been considerable debate about the quality of the product, but no one is denying the impact. "It's not the best film in the world," Crouch said, "but that's not the point. We've coalesced a consumer group that Hollywood and Madison Avenue and Wall Street didn't seem to know existed."

And there will be more such entertainment to serve them, including film versions of the best-selling book series Left Behind, starting this fall.

Code's success has bolstered Crouch creatively and financially. The video debuts this week; Wal-Mart upped its order from an initial 50,000 to 250,000 on the strength of the marketing plan. Some 1.3 million videos at 20,000 retailers make it the year's third-largest video shipment, behind Pokemon and Star Wars. There's also a DVD issue, another first for a Christian-produced movie. Blockbuster has had Code signage up for weeks.

Separately, Crouch has three movies in the works, including the boxing-themed Heart of a Champion and animated Prodigal Son. He's started preproduction on Megiddo, part-prequel, partsequel to Code. The budget will be larger than Code's, and likely will open on double or triple the screens, but the marketing will follow a similar path.

"We'll do it so much better the next time," Crouch said, "because we've learned so much. I feel like I've had a college course education in narrowcasting and building a Web presence."

HOW LARRY THE CUKE ROCKETED UP THE CHARTS

Singing vegetables. Moral messages. 16 million videos sold. And it all started with two small print ads in Christian publications. Somebody say "Amen!"