Movie Audiences Research Articles

Buzz marketing for movies

In today's dynamic entertainment environment, movies are struggling to stay afloat and remain profitable. Challenges such as piracy, digital theft, competition, overlapping movie campaigns, media fragmentation, and audience saturation are forcing marketers to stretch their film budgets and make every dollar as effective as possible. With more and more entertainment options crowding peoples' lives, marketers must search for innovative ways to reach movie audiences. By breaking through the daily clutter and noise, and capturing peoples' attention to the point that talking about a movie becomes an enjoyable experience to share, buzz marketing is one such promotional posture that drives audiences to theaters. In order to achieve success with buzz marketing, however, marketers must recognize the role it plays in the context of movie differentiation strategies to support the company's overall approach. To that end, this article analyzes buzz marketing as it pertains to six movie differentiation strategies (differentiation with cosmetic movie features, differentiation to reach market segments, growing a movie segment, positioning to support the movie image, positioning to extend the movie image, and differentiation via non-traditional channels) and offers steps for its successful implementation.

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Word of Mouth for Movies: Its Dynamics and Impact on Box Office Revenue

This article uses actual word-of-mouth (WOM) information to examine the dynamic patterns of WOM and how it helps explain box office revenue. The WOM data were collected from the Yahoo Movies Web site. The results show that WOM activities are the most active during a movie's prerelease and opening week and that movie audiences tend to hold relatively high expectations before release but become more critical in the opening week. More important, WOM information offers significant explanatory power for both aggregate and weekly box office revenue, especially in the early weeks after a movie opens. However, most of this explanatory power comes from the volume of WOM and not from its valence, as measured by the percentages of positive and negative messages.

Word of Mouth for Movies: Its Dynamics and Impact on Box Office Revenue

Abstract This article uses actual word-of-mouth (WOM) information to examine the dynamic patterns of WOM and how it helps explain box office revenue. The WOM data were collected from the Yahoo Movies Web site. The results show that WOM activities are the most active during a movie's prerelease and opening week and that movie audiences tend to hold relatively high expectations before release but become more critical in the opening week. More important, WOM information offers significant explanatory power for both aggregate and weekly box office revenue, especially in the early weeks after a movie opens. However, most of this explanatory power comes from the volume of WOM and not from its valence, as measured by the percentages of positive and negative messages.

An Empirical Investigation of Signaling in the Motion Picture Industry

The contribution of this research lies in the use of real-world data to test several hypotheses about the role of two signals—sequels and advertising expenditures—in the motion picture industry. The authors analyze the data with a dynamic simultaneous-equations model of the drivers and the interrelationships of the behaviors of movie audiences, studios, and exhibitors. Specifically, the authors test for the attenuating role of third-party information sources, such as critics' review consensus and cumulative word of mouth, on the strength of the two aforementioned signals. The authors find evidence of such an effect both at the release phase across movies and over the postrelease phase for any movie. Notably, they hypothesize and show that sequels and advertising expenditures have a positive interaction effect on box office revenues. This is an important finding because though most firms use multiple signals for their products, empirical work on the interaction of two or more signals is rare. This study offers several new and interesting empirical insights into the market dynamics of the motion picture industry.

RELOCATING AMERICAN FILM HISTORY

This essay argues that one of the legacies of ‘grand theory’ in film studies is an ambivalence toward the spatial and social conditions of the cinematic experience. This suspicion of the empirical has also conditioned scholarship on the history of movie audiences and reception. The history of moviegoing in the American South underscores the importance of space, place, and sociality as constitutive features of the experience of cinema.

Unwrapping Archives: DVD Restoration Demonstrations and the Marketing of Authenticity

Unwrapping Archives:DVD Restoration Demonstrations and the Marketing of Authenticity Nathan Carroll We are in the film Metropolis; we are in an engine room. It's a symbolic room for this film, a famous decoration. It's also a symbol for what we're doing now. We are taking a look into the restoration of a film; we are looking in an engine room to which normally the audience has no access to. —Koerber, Metropolis Demonstrating Restoration Since films were first deemed worthy of archival preservation, film history has been in the business of restoring memories. From Henri Langlois's pioneering efforts to store and re-present films at the Cinémathèque française to Hollywood's perpetual theatrical rotation of canonical re-releases to lost film reconstructions and the current inundation of director's cuts, the recycling of authentic experience for new audiences has always been central to the reputable marketing of cinema as art. While film "restoration" in its most strict material definition refers to a range of specific cleaning and cut-and-paste strategies performed by archivists on fading and badly damaged original prints, there is a second tangible method by which the term operates through artificially restoring movie audiences' memories. Unlike an art gallery, where a masterpiece can be revisited, before the age of home video authentic film experiences were one-offs—projected rarities in space and time to be sought out at great expense. As filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci remarked in a February 2005 interview with USA Today, prior to home video, "going to the movie theater was like going to a church, and seeing the movies with other people was like being able to have a collective dream" (Snider par. 5). Adding to this loss of cinematic aura is the inevitable material damage to celluloid over time. Industrial and archival practices of historical film restoration attempt to reclaim authentic film-going experience as much as possible by returning us to filmmakers' original intentions through the conservation and reassemblage of the most pristine segments of available prints. Yet these salvaging efforts are also indirectly motivated by the theoretical absence of superior elements insofar as it is conceivable that more ideal fragments may eventually be located. In this sense, film restoration acts under the implicit assumption that better surviving components, even if only single frames, might be found at some unknowable future point in some heretofore unexplored archive and hence be materially incorporated into the lifeblood of the newly "restored" work of art. Driven by this archival obsolescence of both film material and film memory, the work of film restoration proper, that is, preserving the historical authenticity of cinema as art, has always been open to the renegotiation of what might be, disguised in the nostalgic, even moralizing rhetoric of what might have been. The dialectic of restorative authenticity is therefore a necessarily double movement toward an ideal historical image of cinema as much as a movement away from what can never be represented again. The rhetorical illusion of authenticity seems embedded in the presumed teleological progress of cinema itself, as if there is a nascent ideal historical moment to be captured and represented at all.1 Thus, the archival fetish of exceptional material elements hides what I consider to be the real work of historical restoration: attempting to recover and cage obsolescent human memories along with the associated affect of aesthetic perception. Amid these competing restoration narratives, digi-talization is merely the latest paradigm of preservation attempts to shore up material closure on cinematic memories. However, digital restoration is significant because it is physically changing the content of film history. With restoration technology we can digitally scrub an image to hyperreal ends, where it can seem like history never happened. Techniques range from hand-painting [End Page 18] individual errors or applying color correction at the click of a mouse to using software that automatically restores lost information through frame sequence comparisons.2 Digital restoration is labor and cost intensive, but the result is never perfect. Automatic correction software used too heavily may actually induce digital artifacts, resulting in the loss of visual information. Hence, digital assistance must be performed artfully to avoid changing original...

Ambi-Diegetic Music in Films as a Product Design and -Placement Strategy: The Sweet Smell of Success

As an important element in the product design of motion pictures, ambidiegetic music in films – appearing on-screen (diegetically) but helping to advance a film’s dramatic development (non-diegetically) – plays a key role in shaping the consumption experience of a movie audience. Further, ambi-diegetic music in films is a kind of product placement in which the individuals who create a motion picture insert a particular offering – namely, a musical performance – in a manner intended to structure a movie’s meaning and to shape its appreciation. As one illustration, this article examines the role of ambi-diegetic music inSweet Smell of Success (1957). This film attracts the interest of those concerned with marketing theory partly because it represents the battle of artistic integrity against the forces of commercialism and especially because the movie’s design hinges on the manner in which ambi-diegetic cinemusical moments work to develop the characterization of a leading protagonist. Specifically, the identity of the guitarist who performs the source music that this character mimes on-camera turns out to carry considerable significance for our interpretation of his personality, disposition, and capabilities. Thus ambi-diegetic music plays a key role in the product design that creates a viable work of art.

Trading Places: "Dr. Mabuse" and the Pleasure of Role Play

Upon its release in 1922, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou's two-part Sensations-film series Dr. Mabuse, der grose Spieler: Bild unserer and Das Inferno: Spiel von unserer struck a chord with an eager public, which found in the films a startling expression of its own experiences of upheaval and insecurity.1 Enthusiastic reviews written upon the premiere of the first installment, Dr. Mabuse, der grose Spieler, heralded the film's ability to reflect and the Weimar Republic's tumultuous state of affairs. The Berliner Lokalanzeiger described it as a mirror of the age, and noted that, though it was not especially uplifting, it was-as a result of the visual power of Fritz Lang's direction- ennobling and genuine in its effect (qtd. in Eisner 57). The B.Z. am Mittag reported that by condensing the spirit of the time into a rapid succession of sensations and adventures, the film successfully fulfilled its function of portraying an age set in motion, thus playfully re-enacting and mirroring life (qtd. in Eisner 57). On May 1, 1922, Die Welt am Montag praised the film as a of its time and a superb portrait of high society, noting its passion for gambling and dance, its decadent hysteria and its expressionism and occultism (qtd. in Eisner 58). Perhaps prompted by the films' German subtitles, Part I Ein Bild unserer Zeit and Part II Menschen unserer Zeit, such early responses to the film reveal themselves to be embedded in a unique variant of the reflection model. Fritz Lang himself underscored the factor of reflection in his essay Kitsch, Sensation-Kultur und Film, originally published in E. Beyfuss and A. Kossowsky's 1924 Das Kulturfilmbuch, declaring that the ultimate vocation of the cinema is to provide a of contemporary times and that Dr. Mabuse owed its appeal to its exceptional ability to do so. It is striking to see the readiness with which Lang and his critics placed, sought, and found in the film a record or a document of their own experiences, particularly because today's scholars in film studies and cultural studies are so aware of the shortcomings of the reflection model. By contrast, we are inclined to complicate the film's relationship to its time, choosing instead to elaborate on the ways in which the text engages in, works through, and thus transforms the historical discourses and cultural moments evoked by its story. Despite the fact that contemporary scholars see in the film than the earliest commentators may have discerned from such close proximity, it is important that we not dismiss responses to the film that rely on this kind of language. They have certainly proven useful in new scholarship on the film, which uses the reviews and the director's commentary as a springboard into discussions of the film's negotiation of the experience of modernity (Gunning) or as a case study for the gap that existed between Weimar intellectuals' ability to represent and recognize the pathologies of the age and their blind displacement of these pathologies through the development and analysis of elaborate metaphors, a process which permitted a lack of self-recognition that became fatal to the Republic (Elsaesser). Like my contemporaries, I build my analysis of Lang's first Dr. Mabuse installments on the moment of self-recognition that occurred upon the film series' premiere, but I shift the emphasis of the discussion away from broader historical and philosophical concerns in order to look in more detail at cinematic spectatorship as it is instantiated in the two-part series. I contend that precisely because of their reliance on a rhetoric of reflection and documentation, these comments and reviews present us with a perplexing yet provocative estimation of the relationship between early Weimar movie audiences and the films they loved. My analysis explores the reasons why such terms of self-referentiality and identification might have served so well to describe the audience's experience of the films. …

Portrayal of Women in Movie Ads Changes Little from 1963–1993

Scholars have analyzed newspaper stories, editorials and photographs.1 Yet, very few studies, by contrast, exist about advertisements in this important medium.2 The image of women in advertising is also a topic of frequent academic investigations. Most studies of this nature examine magazine ads and a few analyze television commercials. Newspaper ads are again neglected in this line of research.3 To study the image of women in media, the inclusion of newspaper movie ads is important for two reasons. First, in a culture generally criticized for portraying females as objects of demeaning entertainment, movies are likely to reflect this phenomenon.4 Such bias is likely to appear in movie ads. Second, newspaper advertising is a critical medium in communication. Many people scan newspaper movie ads to study the genre, stars, plots, show times and locations to decide which movie to see. Because movie ads in newspapers are seen by a great number of people, whether these readers end up in the movie theater, such ads are worth studying. The feminist movement's impact on gender roles in films and whether newspaper ads faithfully reElect the content of movies that they promote are important topics for academic research, but they are beyond the scope of the present study. The present research only focuses on newspaper movie ads. The Feminist Movement and the Present Study The present study aims to understand whether gender roles portrayed in movie advertisements in newspapers have changed to parallel the feminist movement. Movie ads in 1963 and 1993 were chosen because of their association with two milestones in the feminist movement. The year 1963 was significant because of the publication of a landmark book, The Feminist Mystique.5 The movement reached a peak of mass mobilization around 1970 and continued into the 1980s. When a large number of women ran for political office in 1992, it was proclaimed as the Year of Women.6 This suggests another peak in this movement and indicates that the status of women has been advanced in society. If the movement had an impact on the entertainment industry, newspaper movie ads in 1993, a year after a milestone in the movement, should reflect such an influence. The key concerns of the feminist movement include job equality in terms of opportunity and compensation, division of labor within the home, and portrayal of women as sex objects whose primary function is to attract the opposite sex.7 These concerns can be summed up with one phrase--equality between men and women in all aspects. Accordingly, the present study examines the changes of gender roles in the number of appearances, dominance and aggression and treatment as sex objects. Ageism against women, especially female actors, is also of interest.8 Specific guidelines for analysis, such as the quantity of representation, the scale of sexism, dominance, function ranking, aggression and definition of sex objects, were adopted from frequently cited studies.9 Research Questions The present study seeks to answer the following research questions. RQ1: Does the number of female figures increase over time? RQ2: Do movie ads continue to show male dominance over time? RQ3: Does the treatment of females10 as sex objects decrease over time? Method One constructed week was created for 1963 and 1993 to provide a before-after comparison. The sample was randomly selected and then adjusted (one date was substituted) in order to cover both the summer and Christmas seasons because Hollywood traditionally releases a majority of its movies during both time periods.11 The Los Angeles Times was chosen because Los Angeles is the home of Hollywood movies as well as a metro area with a large movie audience. In addition, movies that did not appear tobe released nationally were excluded from the analysis. Advertisements for the same film were coded once unless they were very different from each other. …

American Movie Audiences of the 1930s

he Depression and movies with sound changed movie audiences of the 1930s from those of the 1920s and earlier. Sound silenced audiences, discouraging the sociability that had marked working-class audiences before. The Depression led movie companies to change marketing strategies and construction plans. They stopped selling luxury and building movie palaces. Instead, they expanded their operation of neighborhood theaters, displacing independents that had been more worker friendly, and instituted centrally controlled show bills and policies. Audiences also appear to have become more heterogeneous. All this, too, discouraged the voluble behavior of working-class people. Ironically, in this era of labor activism, workers and their families seem to have become quieter in movie theaters, satisfied with the convenience of chain-operated movie houses.

The Case of FREAKS

The thirty-year ban on the 1932 circus horror film Freaks illustrates how deeply we share cultural notions about the disabled body and people with disabilities. The film's documentary-style exposé of images of “abnormal” bodies enjoying daily life behind the scenes of a circus sideshow greatly engaged movie audiences, but they were simultaneously outraged by its horror-genre treatment of the same bodies collectively avenging them-selves upon “normal” bodies. Ultimately, viewers were engaged through revulsion, not empathy. Contradictory and shifting notions about what constituted “normalcy.” especially normal sexuality, were reinforced. The construction of “freak” was in transition. No longer a celebrated exotic attraction, it was becoming a pathological, scientific specimen. Many audience members were moved to action to protest the film.

Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship

About halfway through the 1998 filmshakespeare in love, a group of players and hired extras, under the critical eye of the theater owner Philip Henslowe, begins rehearsing a new play at the Rose. While Henslowe observes the process with a simultaneously proprietary and befuddled air, his financial backer, the apothecary Fennyman, comes to ask him about the play's progress. Suddenly Fennyman notices a tall, handsome figure bustling about, shouting both instructions and thanks. “Who is that?” the skeptical Fennyman asks. The movie audience knows that it is Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's version of Will Shakespeare, assembling the cast for his play. “Nobody,” replies Henslowe. “The author” (Norman and Stoppard 49-50).

Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship

About halfway through the 1998 filmshakespeare in love, a group of players and hired extras, under the critical eye of the theater owner Philip Henslowe, begins rehearsing a new play at the Rose. While Henslowe observes the process with a simultaneously proprietary and befuddled air, his financial backer, the apothecary Fennyman, comes to ask him about the play's progress. Suddenly Fennyman notices a tall, handsome figure bustling about, shouting both instructions and thanks. “Who is that?” the skeptical Fennyman asks. The movie audience knows that it is Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard's version of Will Shakespeare, assembling the cast for his play. “Nobody,” replies Henslowe. “The author” (Norman and Stoppard 49-50).

American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound ERA Edited by Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby

American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound ERA Edited by Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby

: American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era . Melvyn Stokes, Richard Maltby.

: American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era . Melvyn Stokes, Richard Maltby.

American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era Melvyn Stokes Richard Maltby

American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era Melvyn Stokes Richard Maltby

Viewers' Evaluations of Product Placements in Movies: Public Policy Issues and Managerial Implications

A comprehensive review of product placements from multiple perspectives (marketers, movie-makers and consumer advocates) is presented. We analyze data from a large-scale survey that capture viewersn' attitudes toward placements and important public policy issues. Consistent with prior research, respondents' attitudes toward placements were found to be generally positive. However, our analyses reveal differences across two large, distinct and statistically defensible segments comprising “those who like ads less” and “those who like ads more.” A comparison indicated that attitudes toward product placements in the former segment are more strongly correlated with the following variables: attitude towards realism in movies, and the belief that viewers may be misled by brands appearing as movie props. Regression analyses suggest that two variables (attitudes against placement of ethically-charged products, and the degree to which placements influence movie audiences subconsciously) do not explain the variations in attitudes toward product placements for the “like ads less” segment. Nevertheless, these variables are statistically significant (and reflect the expected signs) in a similar regression analysis for the “like ads more” segment. Moreover, the average attitude against placements for ethically-charged products are significantly stronger for the “like ads less” when compared to the “like ads more” segment. These results provide a richer interpretive context for findings in the Gupta and Gould (1997) study. We provide managerial guidelines on product placements for the benefit of marketers and moviemakers. Finally, promising topics for future study are identified.

American movie audiences: from the turn of the century to the early sound era

Introduction - reconstructing American cinema's audiences, Melvyn Stokes. Part 1 The social formation of audiences: Jewish immigrant audiences in New York City, 1905-1914, Judith Thissen Italian images, historical features films, and the fabrication of Italy's spectators in early 1920s New York, Giorgio Bertellini film and ethnic identity in Harlem, 1896-1915, Alison Griffiths, James Latham the formative and impressionable stage - discursive construction of the Nickelodeon's child audience, Roberta Pearson, William Urichio. Part 2 The politics of audiences: why the audience mattered in Chicago in 1907, Lee Grieveson the revolt of the audience - reconsidering audiences and reception during the silent era, Steven J. Ross viewing the viewers - representations of the audience in early cinema advertising, Kathryn Helgesen Fuller reminiscences of the past, conditions of the present - at the movies in Mill waukee in 1918, Leslie Midkiff DeBauche. Part 3 Audience and the coming of sound: this is where we came in - the voluble audience of early sound cinema, Thomas Doherty Hillbilly music and Well Rogers - small-town picture shows in the 1930s, Gregory A. Waller.

Moviegoers' Experiences and Interpretations of Brands in Films Revisited

The article provides further phenomenological understanding of how brand props are interpreted within the everyday lived experience of the movie audience. Building on previous focus group research and on the grounded theory perspective of social science, the authors gathered first-person audiotaped accounts of experiences with brand props as interpreted in relation to movies, movieviewing, and social experience. Eight focus groups and 30 depth interviews of nonstudent movieviewers who differed in age bracket and moviegoing frequency were conducted. Constant comparative analysis uncovered three themes related to movie centrality and four themes related to consumption-specific aspects of everyday life. The findings reveal that regardless of age or moviegoing frequency, the informants were active participants in the viewing experience and actively interpreted brands encountered in movies. However, to the older moviegoers brands in movies symbolized social change whereas to the younger informants, they symbolized belonging and security. The authors conclude with implications for advertising practitioners and recommendations for future research.