Mission Impossible: Locating Film Studios’ Paid Search Campaigns
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Written By Reprise Media | June 2, 2006 | Share This
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Okay, maybe it’s not fair to pick on a movie that’s been out a month already, but we had a hard time finding online campaigns for any summer blockbuster film while searching today. Whether it came out in May, debuts in July or opens this weekend, paid search coverage for star-studded, big budget movies is spotty at best.
Although many of the big films ranked at or near the top of the organic listings on the Big 3 engines (some didn’t), that only works if you happen to be searching on a film’s title. We say this as fans as well as search engine marketers - if you’ve got a cool website promoting an exciting cinematic event like Superman Returns, we’d like to reach it whether we’re searching for the title, one of the stars (in this case Kevin Spacey), or the director (Bryan Singer) - and in the case of the latter two, most films don’t seem to be bothering to reach out through search.
Occasionally we saw a film running ads against a star’s name, such as this top-placing ad on Google
for upcoming comedy Nacho Libre, served up on results for a “Jack Black” search.
We also saw a relatively aggressive search campaign, for The Omen remake; it garnered the
top Google spot for “omen” as well as “666″ - Fox is getting buzz for releasing the film next Tuesday, on 6/6/06 (get it?). For a short time today it was even ranked #1 for “movie times,” but that was gone before we thought to get a screen shot.
However, these were the exceptions that prove an unfortunate rule, which seems to be that studios think they don’t need inventive paid search campaigns to get those proverbial “butts in the seats.” You could point out that most paid listings for actors’ names, movie genres, characters and even film titles are bought by online ticket sellers, merchandisers, and other tangentially related operators, which could lead to conversions without studios having to spend a nickel. However, if you’re going to go through all the trouble of building a website loaded with flash animation, trailers, blogs, games, and other goodies, is there a reason not to drive more traffic to it for pennies on the dollar?
Topics: SEM: Paid Search |
Funny you bring up movie PPC campaigns. We started running a campaign for a client that has product placement in the new The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie, http://tokyodrift.meguiars.com.
The competitors for the most part are car sites and the Ebay/Amazon generic ads, not a single movie ad so far to compete with. Not that we’re complaining but it is an interesting omission from the search scene.