ZDONK

According to film-releases.com, the movie going public will be blessed with a second installment of the Beverly Hills Ninja franchise. Even better news is that David Hasselhoff will star in this awesomely titled (sequel/prequel?) movie “Tokyo Jones: The Legend of the Dancing Ninja”.

Here’s the synopsis we found online: Caucasian but raised by an Asian family after a mix-up at sea when he was a baby, Ikki grows up knowing that he’s different from those around him, but also quite confident he is a ninja and not just any ninja, but the legendary Dancing Ninja. Ikki gets to prove himself when his beloved Sensei is murdered and Ikki goes to Hollywood to track down his killer, the evil action movie superstar Ansel LaDouche. 

WTF?

I’m not sure what to think, but I’ll see it considering David Hasselhoff’s last performance where he drunkenly takes down a cheeseburger. That being said, I highly doubt “Ikki, the Dancing Ninja” will even come close to “Haru of the Taka Gura Dojo”.

We miss you Chris!

We had the pleasure of pestering yet another Hollywood professional in a Q&A session. This time we sat down with the Chief Marketing Officer at New Regency, John Hegeman.

Mr. Hegeman was an integral part of the Blair Witch Project’s unprecedented success as he headed up the online campaign that drove millions to the theaters. We thought Mr. Hegeman would be the perfect candidate to answer questions related to the changing landscape of movie marketing.

ZDONK: Because more and more people are going online to consume media, can we expect to see studios allocating more of the marketing budgets to digital and online advertising?

JH: Yes, they already do. The importance of 30 and 15 second TV spots is going to give way to short form content online. Promoting a movie property by engaging the audience with short form content online is just more effective.

ZDONK: Will studios be able to cut costs by relying more heavily on digital marketing versus the more traditional methods of TV, print and outdoor campaigns?

JH: The cost to market your film is changing, but not getting any cheaper – it’s just a transfer away from print, and onto digital – one line item to another.

ZDONK: So the studios will be spending less money on traditional media buys, and more money on creating short form digital content to promote an upcoming film?

JH: Yes, that’s right. Even though it’s not any cheaper, the value of marketing online goes beyond the dollar – it’s all about what kind of experience is created for an audience. Digital marketing provides a bigger bang for your buck versus the more passive media outlets.

ZDONK: Can you speak further about this “experience” that digital marketing affords the consumer?

JH: Everything has to feel like it’s entertainment. Creating short form digital content immerses the property in the culture of the audience as opposed to traditional, more passive outlets. We’re no longer selling the audience, but conditioning them, getting them involved in a property in a very personal way. We’re giving them a reason to care about that property.

It is definitely a very interesting time to be involved in some capacity with the marketing of film. The landscape is changing and studios and new companies will continue to come up with more and more creative ways to engage audiences using social media.

With target audiences becoming increasingly able to simply avoid or skip traditional advertisements altogether, marketing execs will be challenged to ensure, as John Hegeman said, that “everything [feels] like entertainment”.

We have removed the animated cartoon from our home page. I’ve attached it below so it can live on in eternity:

Animation Video

We decided to remove the animation because now that we are approaching launch, we will be writing on this blog more about our day-to-day activity as well as periodically releasing some information/designs on the site.

The flow chart that is now on our home page is the simple process that users will undertake when they log onto zdonk.com in the future.

One of the blogs I subscribe to, Movie Marketing Madness, is an informative site about, you guessed it, movie marketing campaigns (for the most part). The most recent post was about how to counteract a movie’s negative word of mouth. While the tips for going on the defensive against negative WOM were very useful and comprehensive, what sparked my interest was the idea of WOM marketing itself and how the power of the Internet and social media increases the importance of word-of-mouth marketing.

We talked about the effectiveness of WOM marketing in an old post about President Obama’s Social Media campaign. The Obama campaign released the chart below (in their social media toolkit), which analyzes what information source a random person would find most reliable. The answer was consistently “a person like yourself“.

Jack Morton Worldwide, a marketing agency, also released White Paper on WOM Marketing and stated that “word of mouth has twice the influence of advertising, press coverage and direct mail/email”.

So how much of a studio’s P&A (prints and advertising) budget goes towards creating an engaging experience for the influencers who will market their brand (film) effectively throughout their communities and social networks? A studio’s use of social media to market various properties is a newer strategy, but I’m guessing that this portion of each marketing campaign will receive more and more attention. Marketing Execs will run campaigns that engage audiences in increasingly creative ways as the space becomes more defined and audiences become more social media savvy.

We will be posting an interview with one of said Marketing Execs (John Hegeman, CMO of New Regency) later in the week, so stay tuned.

Jody Hill is at it again. He’s not the most name brand writer/director, but he’s certainly got a brand. Observe and Report, starring Seth Rogen, is another iteration of Jody Hill entertainment that features a self obsessed, undeservedly arrogant main character that can be described as none other than “Bad Ass”.

His first feature, which was picked up by Will Farrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Productions, is called Foot Fist Way. It’s dark, and really awesome. Danny McBride delivers a ridiculously good performance as the self proclaimed master of the karate demo.

Jody Hill and Danny McBride carried this dark persona into the Gary Sanchez produced HBO series “East Bound and Down” (which just got re-upped for a second season). Again we see a familiar story here about a self inflated ego that hits rock bottom, and must find his way back.

There aren’t many directors out there that have such a identifiable thumbprint or stamp on their product, but Jody Hill (with the help of Danny McBride and Gary Sanchez) has already found what kind of stories he likes to tell.

Observe and Report is just another indication that writer/director Jody Hill is an auteur.

Peter Bart, Daily Variety’s long-time Editor and former Studio Executive, has stepped down at Variety. Interestingly enough, the news was broke not by Variety, but by The Wrap, an entertainment industry blog.  As the NYTimes pointed out, this could be symbolic for trade publications in an industry where news is often broke by independent bloggers.

The trailer for “Where the Wild Things Are” was released a few weeks ago and I just came across a spoof of it on Cinematical…the creators drew upon another one of my childhood favorites and made a trailer for “Everyone Poops” (with the same tone and music as “Where the Wild Things Are”). I’ve also posted the original below, check it out:

Everyone Poops:

Where the Wild Things Are:

Warner Bros has already signed Todd Phillips to write a sequel for “The Hangover” with Scot Armstrong. This is a fairly unprecedented move considering the first installment has yet to be released. The studio clearly thinks this is a great, marketable film and I suppose they didn’t think it was a risk considering how well it was tracking and how well received the trailer was at ShoWest.

Hot off the press…

“How do you defend yourself against a man with two dildos?”

Now I know.