Movie studios typically advertise on television and in newspapers in search of the biggest possible opening-weekend audience. For a new film, The Constant Gardener, Focus Features is intent on building its audience in a different way: by taking aim at readers of niche Web sites and blogs.
Focus, an art-house unit of Universal Pictures, has bought ads for The Constant Gardener on the political blog Won-kette, as well as the Web sites of politically oriented publications like Harper's, The Nation and National Review.
James Schamus, a co-president of the studio, says that such sites draw the sort of people most likely to appreciate the film, a conspiracy thriller based on a John le Carre novel about pharmaceutical companies operating in Africa.
"We looked for the places that sophisticated moviegoers seek out to find things that interest them," Schamus said. "These are the people who are engaged with the world, who are informed about the big conspiracies going on out there."
Ever since the release of The Blair Witch Project in 1999, movie studios have strived, and failed, to replicate the groundbreaking Internet campaign that made that film a marketing phenomenon. These new ad campaigns on the Web suggest that studios are becoming more determined to identify and reach niche audiences online.
An independent distributor, ThinkFilm, has taken a similar approach with the dirty-joke documentary The Aristocrats, buying prominent banners at the bawdy gossip sites Gawker.com and Defamer.com, as well as sites like The Onion and CollegeHumor.com.
ThinkFilm's vice president for marketing, David Fenkel, said, "Some movies just lend themselves to online advertising. The Aristocrats is dirty, it's obscene and it's unrated, which is sort of like the Internet itself."
Seth Godin, an author and speaker on marketing, said that Focus was "clearly ahead of the curve" in seeking an audience based on online behavior. Godin cited a report from comScore Media Metrix, saying that blog readers visit almost twice as many Web pages as the average Internet user. "We know that people visiting a blog are more likely to take action" he said, "to click on a link or buy online."
In particular, the ads for The Constant Gardener seem to seek out people who distrust multinational corporations. The banner contains the taglines "The corruption is contagious" and "The conspiracy is global," and links to the film's Web site, where snippets of dialogue about "payoffs, cover-ups, unmarked graves" can be heard in the trailer.
Joseph Jaffe, the president of Jaffe, a marketing consulting firm in Connecticut, agreed. "The movie is about getting people to talk about a social issue," he said. "Blog readers want to be able to respond and add their own points of view.
"The goal is to find and engage a very small subset of influential thinkers and opinion leaders."
The Aristocrats ad also invites visitors to submit their own version of the film's unprintable joke. ThinkFilm, which has an advertising budget well below the US$30 million that major studios typically spend, is hoping that this interactive component can propel an ad throughout the Web, creating a cost-effective campaign.
Fenkel would not disclose the budget for the Aristocrats campaign but said Web advertising came in at roughly 5 percent of the total ad budget, higher than the industry average of 2.2 percent last year.
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