Marketing

Paranormal Activity is a Blair Witch Project-style horror movie made for $15,000.* When Steven Spielberg discovered it, he liked it so much, he considered remaking it. But then, according to Jim Louderback, Spielberg and Paramount Pictures asked themselves: If we launched this using a non-traditional marketing campaign, how far could it go?

Pretty damn far, it turns out. Released October 16, the film has taken in about $65 million so far, including $22 million this past weekend, even though it was at 35% fewer theaters than its competitors. And it's now number 2 at the box office, just below Michael Jackson's This Is It and right above the new Gerard Butler, kill-fest Law Abiding Citizen.

So how did they do it? According to Louderback, CEO of the San Francisco-based Revision3 Internet television network, by eschewing conventional marketing techniques and building their audience by going after "the new influencers."

Deets after the jump.

* Or maybe $11,000. Louderback says $15,000. Entertainment Weekly says $11,000. Either way, a pittance.

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Remember that old shampoo commercial that went: "And then I told two friends, and she told two friends, and she told...."

Turns out if you're marketing to Gen Y women—and you've got a product they like—the impact will be more like: "And then I told 100 friends, and she told 100 friends, and she told..."

That's because when Gen Y women discover something they like, they megaphone it to everyone they know via online reviews, social networks, text messaging, and blog comments, according to a new study commissioned by San Francisco-based PopSugar Media.

The problem for marketers, though, is getting Gen Y women to like them in the first place. They're suspicious of professional reviewers and tend to rely mostly on recommendations from peers.

"Gen Y women represent a challenge to marketers," says Brian Sugar, founder and CEO of Sugar, Inc. "Marketers must think and act differently when addressing this generation of women online. [The study] shows they want to be addressed as individuals, they can be skeptical of marketing messages, and they are inundated by media and advertising."

More, after the jump.

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The Facebook page for the Spike Jones-directed, Dave Eggers-screenwritten adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are had 1.74 million fans at the beginning of the week, gaining 27% over the previous week, writes Eric Eldon on InsideFacebook. That made it the third top gainer of the week.

About 80,000 more fans joined in the last four days, but growth is apparently tapering off. The page owner doesn't seem to be leveraging the page as well as it could—there have been only three updates in the last week—and Eldon says that could have a material impact on box office sales.

"Lots of late teens and 20-somethings showed up to theaters last weekend in full movie-themed costumes," he says. "The Facebook page could be a way to stoke those feelings now, and keep them going for a long time."

Photo credit: "Where the Wild Things Area"

We at BayNewser are huge fans of crowdsourcing. We believe in the wisdom of crowds. But we also believe the crowd has to have something to work with in order to deliver its wisdom. Which is why we're not certain how much the crowd can help the Gavinator in his effort to pick a logo for his 2010 run for the governor's office.

Perhaps it's just us, but we're not feeling like any of these is delivering the punch we'd expect from a gubernatorial candidate. Still, over 5,000 people had voted by the time we checked it out, and the Gavinator only first tweeted about it about noon on Wednesday. So there you go.

We'll leave it up to you to guess which one is in the lead. (Hint, it's not the green.)

BayNewser is at TechCrunch50 this week, reporting on some of the most promising new startups in media and advertising.

It turns out that real-time online advertising placement decisions might in fact be rocket science.

DataXu, one of the startups that demo'd at TechCrunch's Advertising and Monetization Platforms panel today, enables advertisers to make moment-to-moment decisions about where to run campaigns and what creatives to use based on real-time information the system provides about how currently active campaigns are doing.

The underlying technology and algorithms were designed by MIT technologists, one of who used similar underlying technology for NASA Mars mission planning. CEO Mike Baker was coy about the parallels, other than to say that it involved "using machine learning techniques to take vast amounts of data with a small positive action subset" and "extrapolating from the data what are the right actions."

OK. We totally want to know more. But in the meantime, the vast amount of data comes from tags embedded in creatives, which then send back real-time information—which includes times of day, geographical location, specific creative—on how they're performing. Advertisers can then use that information to make game-time decisions about which creatives to use where and when in the coming days.

Google's Marissa Meyer, one of the expert judges on the panel, said it seemed like it had "the right technology behind necessary to work at scale."

BayNewser's verdict: When it comes to innovation, breakthrough insights often come from noticing how something works in one industry and applying it to another. So we're intrigued.

Before, if you wanted the whole world to become aware of your cause or your product, you had to plunk down about a gazillion bucks to take out a full-page ad in the New York Times.

Today, it seems like all you have to do is create a charming video and post it on YouTube. After all, it worked for that guy who claims his guitar got broken on a United Airlines flight, didn't it?

But sometimes it seems this approach can go horribly awry. Take this video from Taiwanese computer manufacturer MSI. The point of the campaign seems to be to raise awareness about just how thin their new X-Slim Series notebooks are—by showing a bunch of dudes acrobatically catching it in their, um, butts. And sure enough, almost two million people have watched the video. That's two million people who are now aware that there's an ultra-slim notebook out there, should they be in the market for one.

But we have to ask: Doesn't that also mean that there are two million people out there who aren't going to be able to look at an X-Slim notebook without... wondering where it's been?

For you marketing and PR folks out there:

Score: Totally awesome Electronic Arts Madden NFL ad on YouTube this morning.

Fail: Not embeddable.

(Via Silicon Alley Insider)

When the big boys of the media world weigh in on something Silicon Valley-ish, you can count on the Valley's denizens to respond pronto.

Like the New York Times' Sunday piece on PR in tech-land. Faster than you could say "text me the link," Robert Scoble of Scobleizer, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat had moseyed up to the bar to give us a piece of their mind.

Scoble nitpicked a bit but basically concurred with the piece's premise: Want buzz these days? Don't worry about trying to woo big-time journos at big-time pubs. Trust that buzz at the grassroots will go somewhere (if you've got something worthy).

"One thing I've learned is that 15 'nobodies' can get the story out there," Scoble writes on his blog. "Remember when I quit Microsoft? I told 15 people at a videoblogging conference. None of whom were on the 'A list.' Who broke the story? A guy I didn't even know. A guy who wasn't famous, well known, or at the top of ANYONE's lists. Within three days Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft's PR firm) told me we had tens of millions of media impressions. 15 conversations led to that."

What Arrington and Marshall had to say, after the jump.

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The PR business in Silicon Valley is getting turned on its head, says a story in yesterday's New York Times' Sunday Business section. It's no longer about nabbing placements with key reporters. It's about getting key "influencers" to spread the word to their oodles of followers.

The piece, "Spinning the Web: P.R. in Silicon Valley," explores the larger trend through the story of Brew Media Relations' Brooke Hammerling's efforts to get buzz for Wordnik, a new Web site that's a kind of Dictionary 2.0.

In the new world, journalists are no longer necessarily PR's preferred targets. Instead, technologies like Twitter and blogs are putting influencing power in the hands of regular folks and key movers and shakers.

Writes Times San Francisco tech reporter Claire Cain Miller:

"Gone are the days when snaring attention for start-ups in the Valley meant mentions in print and on television, or even spotlights on technology Web sites and blogs....

"In the new world of social media, P.R. people must know hundreds of writers, bloggers and Twitter users instead of having six top reporters on speed dial."

The Wordnik story, after the break.

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So, what are you doing Friday night at midnight? Shaking your groove thing? Watching a "What Not To Wear" marathon? Sleeping?

We've got a better idea: Midnight Friday (technically 12:01 am ET June 13) is when Facebook launches vanity URLs. For example, if BayNewser were on Facebook (we're not, shame, shame), we'd want to grab: facebook.com/baynewser.

Why's this such a big deal? In the new world, journos increasingly need to pay attention to the myriad ways in which they can brand themselves. facebook.com/baynewser—good branding. facebook.com/profile.php?id=53659118154—not so much.

Interested? Friday night, go to www.facebook.com/username and grab your URL. (And, of course, be prepared for the system to crash when 10 million other Facebook users try to grab theirs at the same time.)