Hollywood is missing a major revenue stream with its trailers
With 2015 set to be a year of blockbuster movies trailers are amassing millions of views. In this guest post Tyler Greer argues Hollywood is missing a trick by not attaching pre-roll ads to this premium shareable content.
Star Wars and Mad Max. Unless you had something more important to do, and it’s difficult to think of what that might have been, you’ll have joined the collective inhale of breath as the trailers for these two 2015 film releases went live recently. The bad news is that both movies are still months away. The good news is that Jar Jar Binks doesn’t seem to be present in either.
The two trailers are two of the hottest pieces of content on the planet – at last view having amassed more than 54 million views (YouTube only) between them with tens of millions of us taking part in a global phenomenon – watching, sharing and discussing. Despite this – and somewhat surprisingly – film studios are yet to have their own ‘awakening’ about the revenue generating potential of movie trailers.
It’s Jar Jar.
This is excellent.
I wouldn’t expect anything less from Exponential’s very own Professor X!
Tyler, it’s Jar Jar.
pre-roll is the herpes of the video world. why on earth would anyone publicly call for more of it??
this guy obviously does not know anything about movie marketing! Edward g – you are right, pre-roll is a consumer turn off, so we won’t be actively turning people off watching trailers any time soon….
‘Affixing brand ads to trailers gives a win to all parties.’
As long as you don’t consider the audience a ‘party’.
Uhhh hard coding pre-rolls into content violates YouTube’s Terms of Service.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/154235?hl=en
Kind of why no-one does it…
Furthermore if viewed on the YT platform itself at least the studio already takes a cut of any ads (after YT takes the lion’s share of course).
If the studio were to upload a video with an embedded ad (and it was permitted), it would be a matter of minutes before some fan edited the vid, cut it out and re-uploaded. Have a guess at which one would have 54m views in the end.
@Edward G Murrow & pops
…what would you propose in its place?
More useless display interrupting our general browsing experience?
Every major pub has moved to monetising as much video inventory as possible, probably because it works. Stop whinging and get with the times!
“Affixing brand ads to trailers gives a win to all parties”
…all parties except the viewer and potential customer.
I have no doubt that there’s a great opportunity to monetise this content, but surely there’s another model that doesn’t treat the viewer like a piece of shit.
This guy knows nothing about movie marketing or how the online video food chain actually works. Head of “strategy” indeed…
Matt please share with us exactly what’s wrong with this guys thinking – I thought it was pretty clever!
@Matt..
Tyler is well respected within the Melbourne agency community and has done a lot with his career. Rather than taking a shot at his title, perhaps you can offer a viable alternative solution?
You sound like a young newcomer to the industry and are most likely trolling for the sake of it…. I’ve seen a few of you come and go in my time!
A trailer isn’t entertainment or content, it’s an advertisement for an upcoming product.
So what Tyler is effectively promoting is an ad within an ad? Bravo.
Just what the audience/viewers need and want.
What a terrible idea. Trailers are the advertisement. Why would you slap another on top of it? And why would movie studios risks alienating the potential customers for a couple of bucks? Hollywood is doing just fine, their revenue is growing, not shrinking, despite what this article claims. They don’t need to taint their product with this horrible suggestions that would just piss off their potential customers. And what will happen if they did? It would just cause people to edit the ads out of a trailer, with dodgy uploads and loss of video quality.
“What greater reach do we think that TV need now provide for the Star Wars release?”
Whilst I work in digital advertising I think it’s important to be realistic about the value other mediums can bring.
A figure of 54m streams is mentioned at the start of this article. Let’s imagine that no-one watched the trailer twice (I’ve seen it at least three times, but let’s pretend).
That would mean that less than one fifth of the US population has watched the trailer on YouTube. I would suggest that there is still some reach to be had there before a global launch.
Totally with the people who think it’s a horrendous idea. Trailers are the last bastions of where you do NOT have a stupid ad in front. It’s not “get with the times” but more “Stop telling everyone to ‘get with the times’ just because the whole world is doing it!!”
As many people have commented, a trailer IS effectively an ad for a movie, and as such hard coding an ad before an ad is just stupid. And would also break the long established distribution network for movie trailers: a studio releases a trailer to selected movie-specific sites and news outlets (and these days to their own YouTube channel) with the specific understanding that the sites and news outlets will run the trailer, with or without their own pre-rolls, and so generate free publicity for the film.
The studio gets free publicity and the sites and news outlets get free content to use on their sites. That is the arrangement which has worked well for years, or at least as long as the 10+ years I have worked in online video and been dealing with major movie studios, @Without Prejudice…And as for “offering a viable alternative” it doesn’t need one as the system works perfectly well without someone coming up with the brilliant idea of adding more advertising to what is already effectively advertising.
By adding the studio’s own ad to the start of the trailer would impact the sites and news outlets opportunity to earn revenue from the trailer, and sully the whole arrangement.
And for the record I don’t work in advertising but if your definition of “strategy” is adding more ads to anything and everything then good luck with that.
Worth noting, studios usually send out multiple options for using their trailers, including YouTube embeds from where the trailer sits in their own channels.