Surrounding are constant reminders that digital promotion is becoming an integral part of the marketing mix and spreading through the business horizon. The latest innovator to jump on the digital marketing bandwagon is Hollywood and well, as the old saying goes “if Hollywood’s doing it, it must be a good idea”…

For the film industry, box office attendance and DVD sales remain flat at a steady pace and it’s known that the industry also faces some serious upcoming challenges and changes. Presently however, studios seem to be already productively adjusting to the future as they apply their industry knowledge and observations and embrace new technology to their advantage.

As a matter of fact, at the rate the online spending appears to be increasing in film, the term “embracing”  does no justice in effectively articulating the passionate relationship between online advertising and Hollywood. It seems as though the two are going steady, becoming an item, moving in together….. You get the point.  Quantitatively speaking, film digital ad budgets reached $1.2 billion in 2009 and are expected to grow in 2013 swiftly reaching an impressive $2.7 billion.

Today, almost every film marketing campaign leverages both traditional and new media channels with online film marketing increasing simultaneously in popularity and sophistication. Since there is an overwhelming pressure on studios to generate buzz about the upcoming releases, it only makes sense to go to online marketing for providing effective results. After all, the costs are comparatively minimum and the market reach is comparatively maximum. And it looks as though this is just the beginning – the future holds even more sophisticated online marketing tactics that will continuously assist marketers in turning “Hollywood glitter into box office gold”.

The ways in which online marketing and the film industry intertwine varies from interactive websites, early trailer releases, “fake” releases and online video promos – just to name a few. Here’s a few of the prosperous examples:

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JCpenny’s “The Doghouse” viral short film

As a rule I generally have a low opinion of buzz words and corporate market speak.  It’s a vocabulary too often used by the uninformed trying to pose as the overly informed and in the end those fancy words we come up with to describe new trends grow stale and wind up ridiculed by just about everyone in the know.  Well at the risk of ridicule I’m going to break my own rule and become a contributor, nay a revivalist to the buzz word lexicon with “Advertainment.”  Sure it’s not my own invention and you’ll find it floating around on the blogosphere here and there, maybe in a few industry articles etc. but it hasn’t really found a catch yet.  I’m using it now because there really is no better word to describe the growing trend I’ve been seeing from big brands experimenting with long-form-video-entertainment-advertising (see why we need a buzz word?).

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