Tag: Roger Jackson

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 36: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part III

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part II

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Before I dive into the final part of the Marketing Plan, a quick Kinonation update. We’re now delivering 3 or 4 films a day to video-on-demand exhibitors. That’s a thousand films a year. Not bad, and we’re just getting started. For me the best part is when people respond to films we distribute. One of the dozens of Kinonation films that went live on VoD in August was “Good People Go to Hell…” It’s an honest, objective and entertaining doc about hard-right Christianity. My favorite online review:  “Great movie. Great education about a world I didn’t know much about. Though I don’t share their views, I love listening to people that have passion for what they believe in.” Kinonation isn’t the director, obviously, but there’s enormous satisfaction from helping filmmakers get their films seen, worldwide. That’s what we do. That’s what we love.

OK, back to the Secret 19-Point Marketing Plan. Here’s 13-19.

13. Mailing List: For indie films, building and exploiting a mailing list can be the single most important marketing action. Why? Because these are the people you’ve already connected with — maybe via Kickstarter, or at a festival screening. They CARE about your film. So you’ll get a high return on investment (in time & effort) from communicating with them. You should start building your mailing list early — at the inception stage of your film project. Collect emails relentlessly — at parties, events, festivals. Ask for business cards, and then be disciplined about adding that name & email to your list. You don’t need fancy software — a simple list in Excel or Word is fine.

14. Google and SEM: I truly believe the holy grail for VoD marketing is effective SEM — Search Engine Marketing. It’s what Wall Street brokers would call arbitrage. The internet just makes it scalable. Here’s an example: your film is on Vudu, price is $5 for a rental. You get 50% of that five bucks — $2.50. So you can afford to spend $2.49 on advertising for each rental, since you’d still make a penny. Obviously that’s cutting it a bit fine, so let’s say you’re OK spending $2 to get $2.50 back. You could do that all day, right? That’s SEO arbitrage, and that’s the Google business model.

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 35: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part II

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Secret 19-Point VoD Marketing Plan, Part I

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Here’s Part II of our 19 point plan…

This post was going to be Part 2 of Two.  But I try to avoid overly lengthy posts. And feedback over the past couple of weeks has convinced me to focus this post on just a couple of points:  VoD Windowing, and Facebook Marketing. So…here are points 11 & 12 of the 19 point plan, with the final 7 to follow in a fortnight. It’s not bait & switch, just that, as the Dude said, “new shit has come to light.”

11. VoD Windowing: The film industry is adept at double, triple and quadruple-dipping. They are one of the few businesses that have found a way to sell the same product to you over and over …and over again. It’s genius if you think about it. You pay to watch a movie in theaters, and then maybe you buy or rent the Blu-Ray or regular DVD, or you catch it on Cable VoD or subsequently online Transactional VoD. And even on iTunes or Amazon or Vude there’s a form of mini-windowing by this oh-so-devious business — the choice of watching the film in Standard Definition, or pay a buck extra for HD.  A few months (or, these days, weeks) later it’s on television pay-per-view, which more or less lines up with Subscription VoD, like Netflix. And somewhere in there you also “pay” (via your airline ticket) to watch it on that flight to Paris. And while this is definitely a business model under pressure, with shrinking windows (and therefore profits) it’s still very much the way Hollywood does distribution…and VoD is no exception.

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 34: Secret 19 Point VoD Marketing Plan

By Roger Jackson

 

Previously: VoD: Frequently Asked Questions

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We continue to ramp-up deliveries of Kinonation films — we’ll have 100+ movies live on beta partner VoD outlets by the end of August. So now I have 100 producers asking about VoD marketing. I’ve been working on a marketing plan — not a gimmick, but an actionable, effective system to really launch a film, every time it goes live on any VoD outlet. The “launch” metaphor is apt, I think, because a film needs a booster-rocket to get things rolling. VoD outlets are driven by algorithms — you need maximum thrust in the first days live to get a film onto their best-seller list. Today, writing this post,  I decided to nix the “secret plan” thing — it’s not like it’s rocket science anyway — and share pubicly.

Here’s Part I of our 19 point plan. The real secret is to get this done in a very compressed time horizon — a few weeks at most — so it has the biggest impact coinciding with each time your film goes live on an outlet.  Executing on this plan is NOT a trivial amount of work, probably 100+ hours.

  1. IMDb: staggeringly important, everyone from consumers to VoD outlets to distributors make this site their first stop — and therefore their first impression of your film. Way too many films don’t even have a poster here. You must. It’s mission critical. I know, it costs $35. You have to do it. Next, get some people (cast, crew, friends, family) to rate AND review your film on IMDb. You need a credible # of people…9/10 is meaningless if it’s from a total of 4 people. Here’s the IMDb page for a successful Kinonation film. 8.9/10 from 80 users. Check. Forty critic reviews. Check. Only 3 user reviews. Needs work. Note that this film, like every film we distribute to Hulu, is now automatically available on IMDb via an embedded link. Cool.

  1. Poster: it’s my opinion that poster art is the single most important factor in getting “organic” sales on VoD platforms. By which I mean viewers who are just browsing. Keep it simple, big, bold, readable. Sexy helps too. Or gross.There are many reasons why the health doc Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead is a VoD best-seller — love it or hate it, this is a provocative poster.

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 33: VoD: Frequently Asked Questions

By Roger Jackson

Previously: How to Make Your Film a HIT on Hulu

At Kinonation we get asked certain questions all the time — important issues that deserve thoughtful answers. Bottom line: the world of video-on-demand is new, developing fast, rather complex and full of nuance. Thus, there are no dumb questions. Here are the most frequently asked.

Is my film guaranteed to get on all your outlets?

No. The outlets cherry-pick the films they think will do best for them. The exception is Amazon Instant Video, who believe that curation is the job of the consumer. So any feature film is guaranteed to get onto Amazon, assuming it meets minimum tech standards.

How long until my film is distributed?

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 32: Make Your Film A HIT on Hulu

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned…

Hulu

Hulu has been much in the news this past week. Owned jointly by Fox, Disney and Comcast, it was on the auction block and expected to fetch north of a billion dollars. But the owners changed their minds, and decided instead to invest $750m in a global expansion. Which makes sense — they have great TV content from the parent companies, supplied on a “day after air date.” They have a brand with a fair amount of global recognition. And they have an impressive technology platform.. Hulu have already expanded internationally into Japan, so it makes sense to invest in the rest of the world. Bottom line: they’ve built a highly scalable platform and user experience, and VoD is catching on fast in Europe and Asia, so now’s a great time to launch Hulu Global.

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 31: Kinonation — Mistakes Made, Lessons Learned…

By Roger Jackson

Previously: Movie Live on VoD…Now What?

Ted Hope recently asked me to write about what we might have done differently at Kinonation with the benefit of a year’s hindsight. Mistakes made, lessons learned, what worked, what didn’t…

1. Big, Fat Assumptions

Most startups ventures are premised on one or more big, fat assumptions…which may or may not be accurate, even if you’re convinced they are. Kinonation is based on the assumptions that it’s really hard to get indie films widespread VoD distribution…and that there’s a huge backlog of films whose producers want help with this problem…and that the VoD outlets are actually interested in running indie films…and they have the audience to watch them.

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Diary of a Film Startup: Post # 30: Movie Live on VoD…Now What?

By Roger Jackson

Previously: The Vision Thing

Progress Bar

If you’ve submitted a feature or documentary to KinoNation, you were probably a little overwhelmed at first by all the metadata that’s required. We just made the process much easier by including a real-time Progress Bar, with a dynamic list of what required metadata is still missing.  We’ve also radically simplified the signup & login process. Check it out, the sooner you submit (or complete) a film, the sooner we can get it distributed.

Movie Live on VoD…Now What?

KinoNation films are now going live every day on our beta partners Hulu, Amazon and Viewster. And they’re getting watched. And generating revenue for the filmmakers. So now’s a good time to get into the weeds about marketing. i.e. what concrete steps can get people to discover your film on video-on-demand? And once they’ve discovered it, how do you get them to start watching…and keep watching ‘till the end credits roll? What’s at stake is whether your film makes, for example, a trivial $250 on Hulu in 2014 — or it makes $25,000. And then repeat that across a dozen other platforms? It’s what Gravitas Ventures CEO Nolan Gallagher calls “The Last Mile” — and like every other part of the filmmaking process, it requires imagination, hard work and persistence.

Early Success

Roseanne Liang submitted her documentary “Banana in a Nutshell” to KinoNation a few months ago. Roseanne in the doc is the “banana” — that is, white on the inside, yellow on the outside.

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