La Cusinga’s Chef David has returned from a trip to Panama, and that means that dinner at La Cusinga has become even more delicious.

But that’s not the reason why David Mahler will feature more prominently on Ideas will travel next week. The true reason is that he is an important part of the lodges web presence. In his blog “Chef of the Jungle” he writes about his general philosophy of cooking, and also shares the ups and downs of a gringo’s life in Costa Rica.

Maybe less literary, but more frequent are his activities on Facebook, where he posts this evening’s dish and a photo of the sunset taken from La Cusinga. In case you want to take a look at his Facebook page: there is more than one David Mahler, but only one lists La Cusinga as an employer.

Sharing pictures of food is always a nice idea, and just to make everyone just a little bit jealous, here is a picture of Thursday’s dinner. It’s roasted yellowfin tuna with pineapple salsa puree of camote (local white yam) and (if I remember correctly what he said) chayote or perulero squash. Because you won’t find any soda-cans or platic bottles at La Cusinga, each dinner is accompanied by either fresh water or some homemade fruit juice. In this case: carambole/starfruit.

As we’re talking eco-tourism, David’s dishes are also all-organic, and as local as can be. If you’re interested in the details, hang on. I’ll be joining David next week for some food shopping.

Until then, you’ll find me on La Cusinga’s community deck, counting the hours ’til dinner time.

PS: If there are enough requests, I will try and talk him into sharing some recipes.

The movie industry has now joined the many many industries that are doubting the efficiency of traditional advertising. In search for more efficient pathways to attention, the big studios have been busy shaking up their marketing departments.

Universal’s Adam Fogelson, started the trend of unconventional campaigns in 2007. Sue Knoll became president of marketing at Warner in 2008. Paramount’s head of marketing was replaced in 2008 by Josh Greenstein and Megan Colligan who previously created campaigns for independent movies. And just last week Disney hired an outsider to head their marketing efforts: MT Carney, who ran the New York office of Naked Communication, an advertising agency that shook up the trade by combining brand strategy and creative media planning.

Bold moves for Hollywood, “where movie marketing has always been seen as a specialized skill set carried out by an elite clique of veterans.” (deadline.com)

This has led to real changes in the way Hollywood advertises:

Looking at campaigns like Dark Knight, Cloverhead, Transfomers: ROTF (sic!) and Paranormal Activity, I would like to sum up the new developments in movie marketing in three rules:

1. Big films will be even faster.
2. Small films will be more connected.
3. The biggest films will be both :-)

The first rule is easy to explain. Every once in a while, a really really expensive movie may also be really really bad. It used to take about two weeks until everyone knew just how bad it was. But in social networks, bad news spread like wildfire. The easiest way out of this 100 million dollar problem? More audience, quicker! So expect more advertising on more channels for more screens on the first weekend. Iron Man 2 started with 4380 screens, that’s more than 10% of all movie screens in the US. And a new record.

Of course, this kind of fattest ass strategy takes up the space for medium movies, and increasingly also for the smallest ones. For the last 2-3 years, there was palpable depression at the Indie film festivals like Sundance, as most ways of finding distribution have all but dried up. Independent filmmakers are just realizing they, too, need to reinvent themselves.

NEW BREED PARK CITY – Seeking the Answers, Part 1 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.

Here, the second rule comes into play. Small movies now have to try even harder to find their audience. As they don’t have the wallets to buy attention, they have to earn it. And this is where social media play a big role: The hope is that young filmmakers can find true fans, who stand by them loyally, and will freely advertise their movie in their substantial network of friends? Thus giving them a perfectly targeted and totally trustworthy advertising campaign for free!

This does indeed happen. A famous example being the picture perfect social media campaign for the Nazi Space Invasion parody Iron Sky. The movie’s premise: After successfully escaping to the moon! in 1945, the Nazis are planning a reconquista of planet earth -- in 2018. While the release date for Iron Sky is set “maybe in 2011″, the producers have already engaged in a deep relationship with their audience: For example with a fake online newspaper called “The Truth Today”, that reports straight from the future: “United States move to income based voting in 2020.” being one of my favourites. But it’s not all jokes. There is also a 50 EUR pre-purchase option for the DVD of a film that hasn’t even been made yet. Furthermore, a crowdsourcing platform is used to let fans take over research or design efforts. And of course, all the various social networks are used to spread production news, meetings with fans, jokes, or just random events from the life of the crew.

The most socialwebby part of it all, however, lies in its distribution. It’s social, too! Fans can demand a screening of Iron Sky by clicking on a button and entering their ZIP code. It is this circumvention of traditional distribution deals, that independent filmmakers put their hopes on. Social platforms like Crowd Controls, Eventful or Openfilm have the power to redefine indie filmmaking.

However, the Hollywood studios will not sidestep the social media space. On the contrary, by far the most involving, intelligent and fascinating social campaigns have been created by Hollywood itself; like the award-winning Alternate Reality Game for the last Batman movie.

Another example: the smart social media campaign for low-budget sensation “Paranormal Activity”. Shot for small change (15.000 USD), some folks at Paramount realized that they had stumbled upon a future classic and spent 2 million dollars on advertising “Paranormal” – extremely modest by their standards. The clever campaign intentionally showed little of the movie, and instead described it as an event for horror fans, including a request button on the website to ask for a screening in your vicinity. By avoiding traditional mechanisms, Paramount managed to turn Paranormal Activity into a cult hit, and the most profitable movie it ever released.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UxLEqd074

This leads us to rule #3. In less than three years, Hollywood has learned to use the opportunities of social media in campagins of every scale. It has created bigger and smaller campaigns. It has even shown that it can charm the angry voices of Twitter & Co when it has to. When “unpatriotic” details leaked about its brainfree blockbuster “GI Joe”, and forums and fanpages went wild, Paramount opened up and promised a rewrite to GI Joes tradional Midwestern fans. The resulting film remained surprisingly immune to the scathing press reviews – it had already been finetuned, with massive amounts of research, delivered directly by the target group.

Of course, it is easy to engage in dialoge like this, when your budget is 100s of millions. But what does this mean for the indiependent filmmakers directors? Some ask for a new kind of filmmaker/entrepreneur, others fear that the demands of a community will overpower the creative vision, which should focus first and foremost on the art.

Regardless of who will win this debate, the advent of social media has definitely opened new options to movie marketing. From the big Hollywood studios to the smallest independent director/producer-one-man-show, everyone can now establish a direct relationship with their audience, and offer them tools to support their movie.

Will this save Hollywood studios from going broke? Nope. Moviemaking is risky business. Just look at MGM. Will this unlock chests of gold for independent filmmakers? Don’t think so, either. The digitalization of movie making has made it easier to make a film. The digitalization of marketing has made it easier to publicize it. However, like with journalism or the music industry, it has not made it easier to make money with it. The long tail of the film market is not a fat one.

Only one thing is sure: I’ll soon be getting personal emails from my favourite directors :-)

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Further reading

The first half of this quick look at movie marketing is here at
http://www.ideaswilltravel.com/2010/05/08/advertising-hollywood/

Check out the “Batman-Dark Knight” Alternate Reality Game at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpuC7HhCPWA

A series of the independent filmmakers exploring their future at http://vimeo.com/8928985

Great overview of the Iron Sky campaign at http://www.jenniferhoffmann.com/2010/02/26/fallstudie-filmmarketing-in-sozialen-netzwerken-teil-1-die-kommunikationskanaele-von-iron-sky/

More on the Paranormal campaign: http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=139588 and also http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2009/10/15/with_paranormal_activity_paramount_sets_new_marketing_model/

Finally, a German film request site: http://www.moviac.de/

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWWO3_v9kz8

It takes a lot of money to make movies. Quite necessarily this creates a certain nervousness in the industry. But what really makes movie studios the kings of fickle is this: selling movies is like selling incredibly expensive vegetables. Your average flic goes to mush faster than a banana in August. To be successful, a typical Hollywood movie has about 10 days to earn its production cost at the box office.

Of course, additional money will flow from DVDs, and iTunes and VODs, but the theatrical success massively influences future income from those secondary markets. Differently said: A successful Batman movie gets a lot more shelf space at Blockbuster than, say, Kamikaze 1999.

Motion pictures have thus long been among the most heavily, and most innovatively advertised goods in our society. Ad agency people don’t think much about it, because we usually don’t get those jobs. Nevertheless, a typical Hollywood ad campaign is integrated marketing at its best.

1. It all starts with the seeded rumors on filmfan platforms. Did you hear that “Die Hard V” is now in development? IMDB says yes: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1606378/ and MTV knows details: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1638454/20100505/story.jhtml
2. Next, there’s film related PR in common interest magazines. Remember Daniel Craig in the light blue trunks? http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/files/2008/04/daniel-craig-as-bond.jpg
3. Then the first trailer is leaked in some movie theaters, and afterwards, it shows up on movie trailer sites.
4. About four weeks before the start, billboards and posters and tv-ads pop up everywhere.
5. So do the tie-ins. Shrek IV Happy Meal anyone? Or should it be an Iron Man Burger instead.
6. A full flash website with engaging mini-games and background info goes live.
7. “Making-ofs” and “Behind-the-scenes” are all over network television.
8. Finally, in the last frenetic week, all the film’s stars stack up on amphetamines and first class tickets and hit the talk shows until…
9. Premiere night, which is (at least) featured prominently in the big local newspapers.

A movie like Avatar, with a production budget mumbled to be around 250 million USD, easily adds an advertising media budget of 150 million to its cost. So that it really costs way more than 400 million USD to bring Avatar into the cinemas. This is similar for all movies, even if on a smaller scale. Iron Man 2, Marvel Comics’ sequel to last years success, is reported to have a production budget of 160 million and an advertising budget of 100 million dollars. Because unlike with many other products, NOT advertising is not an option.

While all this is great news for talk-show hosts and TV-stations and microsite producers, it’s a steroid-zombie invasion scenario for mid-sized studios and independent filmmakers. Because there is just no way they can support their films with the same marketing firepower.

What happens if they don’t? Take the now famous case of “Motherhood”, a recent independently produced movie with Uma Thurman. To be honest, blogging moms are not the hottest topic. Granted, the trailer does not spell success. And admitted, it was solid flop in the US last October. But it achieved true notoriety when The Guardian reported that Motherhood made a ridiculous 88 £ at the UK box office in its entire first week.

The film’s UK distributor Metrodome openly admits to not even trying to get people into the theatres, as any regular advertising campaign would never have recouped its cost. Metrodome instead focused on  selling 6000 DVDs. However, the fact that the distributor was content with catnip does not make it any less of a watershed event. Without a big ad campaign, invisibility is now an option, even if your movie has stars like Uma Thurman and Minnie Driver in it.

To be continued: How Social Media may or may not save the day for smaller films.