• Marketing To Moviegoers, Wednesday, August 29, 2007 1 PM

An official Web site is no longer the automatic centerpiece of media campaigns for new movies, and there is a budding trend to launch more than one site for the same movie. Rather than attempting to just build traffic from scratch, movie marketers are placing content such as trailers, tie-in promotions and ads on sites with huge audiences such as Yahoo Movies, MySpace, YouTube and Google.

Marketing executives say that some films still load up their main Web sites because powerful creative talent--actors, producers and directors--demand it, given "The Blair Witch Project" success that rode the Internet to astronomical box office in 1999. Official movie sites cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a sparse indie film to hundreds of thousands for sci-fi and fantasy movies.

But the new mantra is to take a "multi-dimensional approach," says Jim Gallagher, president of domestic marketing at Buena Vista Pictures, because no other film relying primarily on its official site has matched the success of "Blair."

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