Perhaps the most important thing about UCF's MFA is the fact that we own our movies. That is something that separates us from FSU, UCLA, NYU, UT-Austin, & USC. Our projects are belong to us in many ways. They are a piece of our soul, not just an example of the work that we can create artistically. They are not an example of some dogmatic new system for making movies. They are the best example of a story that bursts out of us to tell.
I think that is why I have settled on the tagline:
"OWN YOUR MOVIE."
In every way, our movies are who we are. By the end of our time at UCF we have found the stories that we need to tell, and each of the films that have been made in the program is an example of this.
Before we get into the how of making a guerilla marketing campaign work, we need to discuss the how of how much will it cost? Numerous sources have suggested that without the appropriate funding, any marketing plan is in trouble from the start. If we might agree that something MUST be spent, then the next logical question is, how much? The simple answer here is more than anyone is comfortable with. Percentage of a movie's budget is likely to be at best 50% but more like 65% according to Captain David. But there might be a way that's less painful. This new idea, is actually a very old idea.
Uncle Milty's playhouse was presented by Texaco. The advertising was interwoven with the show itself. For the first part of the 20th century this was how television shows and radio programs paid for themselves. Perhaps the term "soap opera" rings a bell? Well the first serialized radio programs directed at women, were paid for by soap makers. This sort of "in-program" advertising might work for a big budget advertiser and show that already has its viewers but what is the connect with microbudget filmmaking?
The answer at least in part comes from another less than obvious place....Dr. Dre...or more appropriately his headphones. In 2008, the company was lucky/smart enough to get a couple of interviews with Lebron James at the practice facility wearing a shiny new pair of the $300 headphones. Sales jumped 70% after the implicit endorsement. In the London Olympics, this strategy went even more crazy. Before every match Michael Phelps could be seen stretching with the product on, or Usain Bolt would go through his warmups, to whatever soundtrack might have been coming through those very high end speakers. Beats gave away about three hundred pairs of headphones to athletes, even at full retail value that would have been about $90,000 total investment for a return of 120% spike in sales. The value of NBC ad time during the olympics was more than a $1,000,000 per minute. Sounds like a deal.
The take away. Beats knew who would be watching the Olympics, which is their key demographic and they found a way to get to those people without the cost and ineffectiveness of an explicit advertisement. They essentially did what McDonald's has been doing for years, at a fraction of the cost. A celebrity endorsement without the grossness of a direct pitch. To put it in other terms, if Michael Jordan were to have eaten a Big Mac on the sidelines of the original Dream Team's practice time, that would be the equivalent of the Beats marketing experiment this summer.
