Marketing
Posted on June 25, 2010
This last week of advertising on FaceBook has been very enlightening.
Short stats first: $110 spent yielded two DVD sales (streaming and download sales take longer to report for some reason, so data is still pending… hopefully… but not likely.)
If you haven’t considered purchasing a download, stream, or DVD of the film, please peruse the Amazon listing:
http://www.amazon.com/BackPage-Ethan-Norris/dp/B003A02O4W
http://www.amazon.com/BackPage/dp/B003DLCQEG/ref=ed_oe_vdl
(My producer, Angela Gant, needs the money so she can stay in NY.)
The sales results were expected. The ad is hampered due to its static nature. All other web advertising contains dynamic content: motion graphics, video, audio, interactivity, all the necessary tactics to attract attention. (I will attempt more frenetic advertising on entertainment sites, mostly with video from the trailer.)
What qualified it as a success was the five hundred visitors this site enjoyed over the week. The oddities continue with the dozens of visitors that found my personal site:
as they researched the film. I wonder how Angela Gant’s site fared with such additional traffic:
Initially, each campaign had a budget of $10 per day (resulting in over fifty thousand impressions per day and hundreds of click-throughs.) After two days, I’d reduce it to $5. So, now I’ve scaled back the FB ad budget to $1 per day in four markets: NY, LA and the East and West hemispheres (specifically targeting the countries of Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Spain, France, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Great Britain respectively.)
All campaigns have targets of both men and women, ages 13-50 (except NY and LA which target ages 18-50) and who have identified themselves with interests of: filmmaking, independent film, and mockumentaries. This bring each population to approximately ten thousand people for each of the four campaigns.
Like I said, each campaign now has a daily budget of $1. I’ve bid for impressions over clicks, obviously. So, bidding an average of $.33 per one thousand impressions gives each campaign an expected minimum of fifteen thousand impressions per day. With a population of ten thousand, each campaign will have half of its citizens seeing the add twice per day (if they log onto FB twice or navigate to other pages.)
Thus far, this results in one or two click-throughs and 6-12 thousand impressions per day, per campaign. (I know, those impression numbers seem off, FB changes the value of clicks and impressions throughout the day, and has different values for different geographic markets. I wonder how much race, ethnicity,and socio-economic factors are considered in evaluating a person’s audience worth quotient. Maybe event FB activity and ad participation is measured too.)
Another day should determine the true average number of impression I should expect.
BTW, the marketing jargon “impression” simply means the act of placing the ad on a web page. (It incorrectly implies that the surfer actually looked at it and furthermore makes the outrageous suggestion that they actually saw it and regarded it.) Their other term, “click-through” is self explanatory.
Another queer item of note is the several dozen people who subscribed to my blogs via RSS feeds. Now I feel obliged to say something worthwhile for posterity (hence, this post.)
I was thrilled to see hits outside the target markets. My favorites were: Beirut, India, and Russia.
I was also clocking the film clips’ success on my youtube and vimeo accounts. The strange thing was that they were not being played, even during the heaviest traffic, when over one hundred visitors per day were viewing the clips page. My solution was to more accurately label the clips: trailer, deleted scene, outtake montage, and music video. After that, viewership climbed significantly. The punchline is that Kelley Beaman’s scene ( http://vimeo.com/6546112 ) on that page outplayed the trailer (http://vimeo.com/11013011 ) two-to-one.
What I absolutely fell in love with is the international campaigns. They were more affordable, yielded more impressions, and (most importantly) resulted in the most click-throughs (at least twice the amount of the national campaigns.) Thank you South Korea, Japan, Canada, and Italy. I owe you a Coke.
What made me want to vomit is the response I received from my neighbors in Texas. While not as expensive as LA, Texas was not worth the premium cost of impression. Click-throughs were absolutely anemic. After two days, I had the bright idea to just target Austin, the filmmaking capitol of Texas. With a population of six thousand (using the demographic parameters previously stated), the $5 per day budget yielded twelve thousand impressions (therefore numerous double exposures)… and two click-throughs. Lame. I specifically chose a Monday to perform this experiment, when most people are cruising their FB accounts at work. So no more Austin or Texas campaigns.
To conclude, I’ll leave these four campaigns trickling in at $4 per day for the next two months and see what happens.
I’ll try some guerrilla tactics next time. I’m thinking urinal screens with a picture of me on them.
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On stalkers and fanaticals
Posted on April 23, 2010
Some of you may remember Martin Delgado (aka Bonder Rodriguez).
About a year ago he messaged me to convey his admiration of the film. I thanked him and it seemed innocuous enough.
When he soon told me that he was making marketing efforts on the film’s behalf to entertainment blogs and sites, I thanked him but asked him politely to cease. It’s very important that I control the brand and message at this stage.
Long story short, the relationship deteriorated and he quickly became a troll. After that turn of events, I don’t know what he said to the blogs and sites about me, but if it was anything like what he said to me…
Hopefully, all his email efforts went down the same black hole mine do with these publishers.
It climaxed when he mentioned in an email a compliment about my daughter’s performance in a school recital. I’ve never met him face to face. So, I had to get stern and threaten a restraining order. i haven’t heard from him in over a year.
Before I get to the recent development, let me inject a humorous anecdote.
There was another strange email conversation with an admirer that made me nervous (because of recent events with Martin.)
Andy’s email name was Toby Damit, he moderated The Secret Hand-Holding Society on MySpace. We’d discuss the film and it’s message and peoples we both knew from it. But then, his messages would ramble into non-sequiturs like this:
“i am too weak……..i want to come out……..i am too weak and weird…………….i am a recluse…………………….i smell…………………im ugly………………….i cant be around people……………..let’s have a secret pen-pal-menship here through electronic mail in a invisible world of 1’s and 0’s”
That left me thoroughly rattled until Adam Dapkus verified for me that he knew him and that he was cool, if just a bit off.
So, the recent development involves a lady named Suzy McG (sometimes credited as “McGee’.) She’s been offended by the film and had started a campaign to stop it.
Here’s the FaceBook group she started:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114882311869876
She makes board posts about this all over the internet. In a delicious twist of irony, they all are removed soon after. So, I can’t post a working link. But the message has made itself into several email chains. Here it is:
Help me stop an anti-American film!!!
Please help me fight for our American integrity.
I cannot stand by when a film is about to be released about college students having sex with prostitutes, filming the sex sessions, and making pornography!
A friend of mine told me about a screening she went to back in November, in Fort Worth Texas, at the film festival they hold there.
It’s called “BackPage”, written and produced by a lesbian. This isn’t another suburban folklore, this is the website:
http://www.backpagemovie.com/clips/
I’m an open-minded, modern woman, but outright hatred and disrespect for women is intolerable, in my opinion.
Furthermore, I have found out that the film also smears and denigrates our armed forces, and deliberately mocks conservative American values.
But, what shocked me the most is the vulgar way the Bush administration and the Tea Party movement is portrayed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot5dm7b-7N8
WARNING!!!! The following clip has the worst profanity and sexual vulgarity!!!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_OUL2cfOfo
I haven’t seen the film, but I cannot imagine how scenes such as these could have an appropriate context in any film!
I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m at a loss about how to approach this particular issue.
I was content to let the film die in obscurity after that screening, but I just found out that the film is gaining momentum at more and more festivals and will soon be released nation-wide!
I know what power a positive conservative vocal majority can have to influence such matters. We recently stopped the blasphemous homosexual Jesus play “Corpus Christi” from being performed in both Tarleton State U, Stephenville and Fort Worth, Texas. All we need are more little victories like this, and I know that the same thing can happen here.
I don’t know what to do, but maybe the manager of the film can be forced to listen to reason?
They are Virgil Films:
http://www.virgilfilmsent.com/
The site has a contact page full of email addresses of their staff to reach them. I’ve already written to these people and told them I do not appreciate their efforts.
I’ve also messaged all the conservative, republican, tea party, and christian groups I can contact. But all of them either do not respond or pass the buck to other groups. I know they are busy with important world-shaping events, but I’m at a loss. At the very least, please forward this email to those friends and family of yours that do care about our country’s moral fiber.
I’ve created a FaceBook group to mobilize this movement:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114882311869876
We already have almost one hundred members.
Is there somebody you could pass this on to that can do something? They need to know that quality citizens won’t silently be mocked and slandered.
Definitely, if you see this DVD at your store, or available online, or the film scheduled at local festivals near you, we need to let those proprietors know that we will not tolerate such filth!
Thank you,
Suzy “McG”
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