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Online
Feature Film Sponsorship
What’s
the big idea?
There's no more doubt - marketing is moving online. In
the USA Pepsi was absent from the Superbowl ad break
for the first time in 23 years. Broadcast TV and print
media are on the ropes, hit hard by reductions in ‘eyeball hours’.
But as people go online for entertainment they scatter
to the four corners of the web. This makes it hard for
advertisers to find concentrations of potential customers,
or cut through the noise and differentiate their message.
Our new startup XTVN.com solves that with what we believe can become
a regular alliance of advertisers and content creators: establishing
exclusive deals with carefully selected brand partners and providing
a precise concentration of potential customers in one place. We achieve
this by producing tightly demographically-targeted feature film entertainment
and making it available to view online as well as via the traditional
distribution channels.
As we developed marketing strategies for our films, we noticed that
by building a demographically specific audience we were also creating
something extremely valuable to advertisers. Furthermore, by working
together with the corporate sector and pooling resources and brainpower,
we can achieve far better results in drawing customers to a specific
website than either of us could by working alone.
Traditional film distributors are still afraid of the web, believing
the risks of piracy outweigh the benefits of publicity. We know that
any financial shortfall can be made up by advertisers more than happy
to see a film file-shared, simply because their brand logos are being
circulated with them. Furthermore creating content specifically for
this purpose has the added effect of honing the target demographic
far more tightly than traditional film ever would.
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Additional benefits of this method are immediacy and permanence.
If you’ve paid for product placement in a feature film before,
your brand was visible for at best a few seconds to an audience
in a theatre or living room. With online distribution, your logo
- and with it a link to your company’s website - are potentially
visible throughout the film, and will remain online for new audiences
to discover in perpetuity.
The first film out of the gate is likely to be The Booze
Cruise, a road movie comedy aimed at 15-35 year olds (incidentally
also a group also most likely to already have experience
watching feature films on their computers). As this is the
first film to use this proof-of-concept sponsor-driven business
model we’ve
deliberately kept the budget low, yet certainly within the
ballpark of many other independent feature films, including
the last two our associates have produced.*
We have a UK sales agent who will be taking the film to markets
and festivals to sell overseas territories and additional distribution
channels such as pay-per-view, TV and DVD, as per traditional
film distribution, which will only serve to increase the spread
of your brand awareness to a broader audience base and demographic.
In summary we feel that the time is right to throw open the doors
to a new era in distribution and brand-integration and we very
much look forward to hearing your thoughts, ideas and contributions
on this exciting new territory.
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* Christine Hartland produced the critically acclaimed
WMD www.wmd-insidestory.com which was one of the
first films to launch with the innovative distribution
model of simultaneous UK theatrical release & iTunes
launch in 2009. The film has been described as: “undeniably
gripping... definitely worth a look” – The
Guardian.
* Yvonne Deutschman produced and directed The Power of Three
starring Toyah Willcox
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