Abstract
Entertainment firms communicate with consumers through some channels in which the firm can tightly control the message, both its content and delivery. “Paid” channels refer to traditional advertising in all of its forms; the firm crafts a message and then pays a channel for delivering that message to consumers. Key questions we address in this chapter include what messages to emphasize and how much to reveal of an exciting storyline, how much to spend, and when to advertise (pre- versus post-release). In today’s digital times, firms also communicate with consumers via “owned” channels such as websites, social media pages, as well as their products’ packaging. We argue that for managing such owned channels, a “pinball” approach to marketing is essential: the firm puts a message (like a pinball) into play, but the message is alive and is batted about by bumpers and spinners by consumers and traditional media. We discuss the main challenges for successfully playing pinball marketing for entertainment products.
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Notes
- 1.
Most of the decline of the offline advertising effect in the figure comes from outdoor, not TV and print. But editorial content of both TV and print has lost large parts of its awareness-related power.
- 2.
See the section about the pinball character of entertainment communication in the digital age.
- 3.
Or just go to https://goo.gl/rMU426.
- 4.
If you are interested in a comprehensive historical review of trailers, please do not miss Kernan (2004).
- 5.
See also our discussions why we value entertainment stars in general in our chapter on entertainment brands.
- 6.
At the HSX consumers trade virtual stocks of upcoming films; the “stock prices” reflect the expectations of the game’s “investors” (i.e., players) regarding a film’s financial performance.
- 7.
This spoiler was heavily criticized by many at that time, including a court which named it “immoral” and forbade SAT.1 from revealing it—again…
- 8.
For example, Twitter user “luckymojo” told his followers that he has “no interest in seeing [the film] Life As We Know It, especially since they tell you the entire plot/outcome of the movie in the trailer…”
- 9.
Yan and Tsang reported similar patterns in other constellations: when they asked 92 consumers to watch a recorded 8-minutes clip from an NBA finals game, those consumers who were told which team won the game had a 12.5% lower anticipated enjoyment than others. And for a fictitious thriller movie, spoiling the identity of the murderer reduced watching intentions by almost 20%.
- 10.
That difference was not statistically significant, though.
- 11.
The difference is only significant though for the low intensity spoiler (which corresponded with worse film evaluations than the high intensity spoiler here), which indicates that the two spoilers variants differed also with regard to other, more qualitative criteria.
- 12.
Find out what “spoiler type” Netflix thinks you are at https://goo.gl/fEv2Fg. But be warned—there might be (will be!) spoilers…
- 13.
We will get back to their two-step flow model in the context of our discussion of word-of-mouth effects.
- 14.
We provide empirical evidence for this in our discussion of antecedents of pre-release buzz for entertainment products in our chapter on “earned” entertainment communication.
- 15.
Similar rules-of-thumb are at work for entertainment products other than films. For example, book publishers are reported to base their budgeting decision on the existence of a star author and that author’s celebrity status or number of previous bestsellers (Shehu et al. 2014).
- 16.
To be included, artists had to operate a site on the platform MySpace, which was probably more the case for lesser known artists than for superstars; the data set represents about 10% of the total annual advertising spending for music in the U.S.
- 17.
Interpreting VAR model results is somewhat tricky—elasticities cannot be directly taken from the estimated parameters, but have to be calculated with so-called “impulse response functions.” Using the ad spending from the previous week constitutes an exception, with parameters serving as (constant) elasticities.
- 18.
Papies and van Heerde’s results suggest it does not change with regard to concert sales.
- 19.
Please see our discussion of the various, and often sequential, entertainment distribution channels. Spillover effects can be expected to be mostly indirect by triggering the success of the film in theaters which then is a major driver of success in subsequent channels. Luan and Sudhir (2010) provide empirical evidence for such an indirect spillover effect for a data set of 526 movies newly released on DVD (from between 2000 and 2003); whereas theatrical advertising spending has no direct statistically significant effect on DVD sales, the movies’ box-office results have an elasticity of almost 1 for DVD sales. Their results also point out that advertising at the DVD release is much less effective than theatrical advertising for its respective distribution channel—the average elasticity for DVD advertising is only 0.03 on the release-week sales of the DVD (and drops quickly afterwards). We discuss in much more detail the indirect effect via success later as part of the “earned” communication chapter of this book.
- 20.
To be precise, Ho et al. use only TV ad spending in their study (because they want to compare its effects with those of Super Bowl advertising on TV—see in the text below). However, because they do not include any other (i.e., non-TV) advertising media in their analysis, the TV spending measure serves as a proxy for ad spending in general, rather than reporting only the specific mechanisms of TV advertising.
- 21.
But let’s keep in mind that Basuroy et al.’s study is based on only 11 sequels.
- 22.
Our discussion of this process in our entertainment consumption chapter might serve as a good start.
- 23.
In Meiseberg’s study, the bivariate correlation of −0.39 between the provision of a sample and the book’s sales rank is higher than for most other variables such as word of mouth and price, and comparable to the correlation of sales with the TV appearance of a book title.
- 24.
Please see our discussion of this issue in our chapter on entertainment distribution.
- 25.
We look into this phenomenon more deeply in our discussion of “earned” communication in the next chapter.
- 26.
The term “owned media” itself is actually a little misleading, as producers usually only rent the media from the platform providers or use it for free, compensating the platform with advertising spendings. It can be considered a reminder of the early days of such digital meeting places, where the places were usually “brand community” websites hosted by producers themselves. Although such sites still exist, their relevance has fallen far behind those environments provided by platform providers.
- 27.
Customer engagement value is a multi-dimensional performance indicator, combining consumers’ repurchase and referral intentions, among other contributions. For a more detailed look at the concept, we refer you to the article by Kumar et al. (2010).
- 28.
In Berger and Milkman’s study, engagement is most strongly stimulated by anger and awe—a one standard-deviation increase results in a 34% (anger) and 30% (awe) higher probability that content is shared with others. The authors used different methods to measure their drivers of sharing behavior—general emotionality and valence were measured with an automated text mining approach, whereas they used human coders to determine the specific emotional potential of articles.
- 29.
At the time of writing this, the original website for the film was still accessible in its historic format: explore it (at your own risk…) via https://goo.gl/2w3gm4.
- 30.
As an aside, the film’s producers were later (unsuccessfully) sued for similarities of their teddy bear character and their social media marketing approach, including the wording of some Twitter posts, with a web series that had aired on YouTube three years earlier and its marketing campaign (see Robb 2014).
- 31.
See this book’s discussion of the pre-release buzz concept and its contributions to entertainment success in the next chapter.
- 32.
An illustrative consumer comment was: “Seriously? I paid 80$ to have Vader locked?”
- 33.
One of the controls in our study is “traditional” star power of the actors, which remains significant and important. That’s why betting exclusively on an actor’s social media power would not be a good idea.
- 34.
The authors integrate the four ratings by calculating the mean score across raters, which they weigh by each rater’s “confidence” in his/her judgment.
- 35.
To verify their somewhat surprising results, the scholars took an in-depth inspection of the book covers in their data set and found enormous differences in cover design: “The 50 most attractive are densely designed, with vibrant colors, whereas the 50 least attractive are sparsely designed, with a great deal of white space” (Schmidt-Stölting et al. 2011, p. 40).
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Hennig-Thurau, T., Houston, M.B. (2019). Entertainment Communication Decisions, Episode 1: Paid and Owned Channels. In: Entertainment Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89292-4_11
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