kgmadman at 2009-10-13 00:29:47:

I was lucky enough to marry a gorgeous woman who majored in marketing and wrote one of the first thesis on undercover marketing. She's now working on a campaign for one of the larger computer brands (god willing the economy doesn't get any worse)

In words I could understand, she explained marketing cost as becoming a problem of decentralization even more so than the number of media outlets. Where there was once a small number of very large billboards one could display an advertisement, the internet has created hundreds, meaning that any money spent on a television spot for the highest rated show on t.v. captures a viewership as small as a fifth of what it would have twenty years ago. (Which is why WWE still generates decent revenue,it's one of the few programs with a very centralized audience of 18-25 males...or was until recently)

The problem could create a new, albeit much smaller, opportunity for writers to squeak in. I think there's a case to be made that film studios, and screenwriters especially, will need to create smaller films which focus on very specific portions of the public, much in the same way that book publishers now operate. If you're a writer who happens to love stories about Japanese tea pots, that kind of film produced on a modest budget doesn't need to suffer these kinds of marketing costs. The internet has done the work of gathering Japanese tea pot enthusiasts into a centralized base camp where they can be advertised to.

Although I'm not so sure the kind of mega-money greed driving the industry would be too thrilled about picking up pennies here and there as opposed to snatching a few hundred million in one weekend. To each his own I guess.

Tom at 2009-10-13 09:52:04:

”… we should at least know how they (marketing people) think.”

In my opinion, it is critical that we know how marketing people think, and perhaps be able to think like them when needed.

Just as we keep production costs in the back of our minds, we also need to keep marketing there, too. After all, when we pitch, we’re marketing. The first ten pages are marketing. Getting your script into the right hands is marketing.

Additionally, with more advertising dollars being spent on non-traditional marketing like the internet, it becomes more likely that the screenwriter will eventually find a clause in the contract calling for the creation of ad copy; and why not, we’re already writers, we know the story and we know the internet (for the most part) and like a lot of big corporations, there is a disconnect between the decision makers, marketing and the product support team (screenwriter). The executives will notice little difference between the screenwriter who wrote the script and the copy writer in marketing (many of whom would like to be screenwriters for more than 30 seconds at a time) and so they will assume the jobs are one and the same.

Tom at 2009-10-13 09:52:50:

Another aspect of movie marketing I find fascinating is the billboard marketing phenomenon that seems to be found pretty much only in Hollywood. I’ve lived all over the country, visited New York (particularly Manhattan) on numerous occasions and am in Los Angeles every couple of months. And billboard marketing for movies and television seems to be pretty much limited to the greater Hollywood area. It’s surprising how a billboard for a movie can be so different from its one sheet or other advertising. Two that I particularly remember were the multiple different billboards for Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the one creepy billboard in many locations for Disturbia.