• by Will Kassoy , September 27, 2012

Entertainment marketing is the only business where every product is an event and every product is its own brand. Take a look at the top 10 movies right now. You’ll see 10 different brands with their own budgets, imaging and value propositions. The only thing wrong with that picture is that entertainment marketers are relying too much on TV and display advertising and not enough on innovative approaches to reach their audiences. 

While TV and display are attractive to marketers to generate immediate reach, there is increasing evidence that the impact of these advertising media is on the decline. Why? Consumers aren’t seeing the ads. Brand marketers are demanding that content sites fix the view-ability problem. Some companies have reported that more than 60% of all display ads are not viewed or are only in view for less than a second online. TV has an attention-deficit problem --more than 84% of people are doing something else while watching it. While entertainment marketers have done a great job of getting trailers online and in long-form commercials, it takes great skill to ensure you are on the right programs or sites at the right time to make sure your message is getting through. 

The solution lies in mobile and a cross-screen advertising strategy. Mobile devices are finally reaching mass-market penetration, and there is growing evidence around the effectiveness of mobile video advertising. Since mobile is a lean-forward experience, you have a captive audience who can not only consume your message but can also engage for longer periods of time. That’s key for entertainment brands looking to drive both awareness and engagement, ultimately resulting in demand and word-of-mouth. Click-through rates on mobile are typically five to ten times higher than online and sometimes even higher. Additionally, ads are served one at a time, automatically solving clutter issues. Mobile is the ad effectiveness platform.

Mobile is part of a cross-screen strategy, which has been proven in several studies to provide brand lift, including entertainment brands. It holds the promise of treating the individual entertainment brand like it’s special. You wouldn’t put a trailer for “The Hobbit” in a tiny exchange-based display ad. But you would put a video clip on the home page of a major web portal. Entertainment marketers want to “own” popular consumer destinations and use video to drive demand in these destinations. What’s great is they do that now with mobile as well, increasing reach, frequency and value of the ad campaign. That’s what a cross-screen strategy does. It integrates video across screens and reaches more consumers and can effectively maximize consumer demand for your entertainment brand.

Cross-screen strategies are necessary for entertainment marketing success. Within that, however, there are a lot of choices and approaches to how a campaign is executed. I believe there are four critical factors to consider for cross-screen success:

• Targeting – Reaching the consumer most interested in the product is obvious, but understanding what the target consumes, how they consume and when is increasingly important. Heavy entertainment consumers are tech savvy and are increasingly consuming content across all screens (sometimes even at the same time with TV co-viewing apps).
  
  
• Let video do the heavy lifting: The trailer and images that are so important to each property can be best exploited with cross-screen strategies. Feature films put so much money into the production value of the film, the best marketers are leveraging the product heavily in their advertising campaign and they should! Banners and billboards are reminder media and don’t move the needle like video.
   
• Quality and user experience matters. Users will not view a mobile ad or trailer if it looks crappy or takes forever to load. On the other hand, they will stay with an ad that delivers HD quality, and that view will be the most engaging experience in their interaction with a brand.
   
• Engagement – Digital platforms are all about engagement. What’s nice about mobile is that engagement rates are much higher than social and online, it’s a great way for entertainment marketers to drive both awareness and to acquire loyal fans. 

Video and cross-screen strategies solve a lot of marketing problems and create a lot of opportunities. You wouldn’t trust your expensive and unique brand to anything less.