Universal McCann - Unviersal McCann/Los Angeles, Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment team for online marketing of 'Hollow Man' DVD - Brief Article

Brandweek, June 18, 2001 by Alan J. Frutkin

Best use of new media

For years, movie marketers have used network TV roadblocks to build interest in their films. But rarely has a movie studio used the same technique in its Internet marketing of those films. That is, until Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment, along with Universal McCann/Los Angeles, went online to the exclusion of all other media in marketing the DVD and home video release of Columbia Tristar's scifi thriller Hollow Man.

"Our objective was reach," says Cheryl Lodinger, senior vp of marketing for Sony Pictures' Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment. "And because Hollow Man is not a traditional title, we decided that the Internet would be a great way to let people know about it."

Lodinger, who came up with the idea, added that she and her team knew Hollow Man's sci-fi nature would appeal to young males, a demographic known as active Internet users. And to reach as many of those young males as possible, Columbia Tristar posed the question to McCann as to whether or not they could apply a roadblock-like buy to the Internet. And whether it could be done with a budget of about $200,000.

"Initially, our thought was that it would be too expensive to roadblock the entire Internet," says Steve Aleksich, McCann's account supervisor on the Hollow Man project. Aleksich added that the McCann team then embarked on a more targeted approach to the campaign, narrowing its focus to several top Internet portals, entertainment sites, and sci-fi sites.

The street date for the Hollow Man DVD and home video release was Jan. 2, which, by all accounts, was not the best timing. "It's post-holiday," Aleksich says. "So a lot of people already had purchased gifts before Christmas." But even if consumers traditionally are looking to save money after New Year's, Lodinger says this particular post-holiday season still had provided them with a silver lining: "Many people not only got DVDs for Christmas, they got DVD players."

McCann offered Columbia Tristar three different scenarios: a campaign on New Year's Day, on the actual street date, or the Friday after the street date. While traditional media buys usually go out in advance of a street date, Columbia Tristar chose Friday, Jan. 5, for its online buy, partly to steer clear of any holiday sluggishness, and partly to take advantage of any weekend consumer activity.

"Obviously, the Friday going into a weekend is a big day for retail to advertise," Lodinger says. "And we wanted to do this on a weekday, so that people who don't have Internet access at home, but who have it at work, would be able to see the campaign."

Once the date was chosen, the McCann team began approaching various portals and sites to inquire about purchasing entire inventories on January 5. "Our first thought was to not do any targeting. But some people thought we were crazy," says Elias Plishner, McCann's interactive media strategist. "We soon realized that putting a message across a platform like Yahoo was a lot of inventory. It was about several million dollars worth of inventory. And that just wasn't feasible for us."

Fortunately, that proved not to be necessary. The agency decided that it could go into areas where young males would most likely be: mainly, sci-fi, tech and entertainment areas. McCann whittled the Hollow Man buy down to two portals, Yahoo and Lycos, plus the young male-skewing entertainment site ign.com and Sci-Fi Channel's sister site, scifi.com.

Then came the somewhat tricky task of choosing the timing for the roadblock.

"Our thought was to run it all day long, but because of budget constraints, we knew that wouldn't be possible," Plishner says. So Universal McCann determined when Internet traffic spikes most. The findings: The best time to hit the target audience was both the mid- to late-lunch hour for workers and what is generally referred to as Internet prime time--6-9 p.m.--for home-computer users. To capture consumers nationwide they chose to run the roadblock between 12-4 p.m. EST, and 6-12 p.m. EST.

Chuck Coons, Columbia Tristar's director of online technologies and domestic marketing, says that in addition to McCann's media buy, several hundred advertising-free sci-fi fan sites also were contacted. And many of them agreed to post at no charge either the banners that Sony created for the campaign or an image from the actual packaging.

It worked. According to Videoscan, which tracks consumer sales of DVDs and home videos (and which is owned by Mediaweek parent company VNU), Hollow Man held the No. 1 spot on the sales chart for its first two weeks of release.

McCann's Aleksich says the ratio of delivered impressions to booked impressions for the Hollow Man buy was high, and that with approximately 4 million impressions recorded, the campaign over-delivered by 20 percent. Plishner adds that despite going up against the DVD and home video releases of films such as Gladiator and Scary Movie, Hollow Man sustained substantial numbers of impressions for its first month of release, and remained in the top 20 in sales throughout its first three months of release.