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American Morning
Internet Fertile Ground for Movie Marketers
Aired July 10, 2001 - 11:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: The Internet has become a major tool for the music and movie industries, and they're trying to market themselves that way. We're going to bring in Justin Oppelaar. he is in New York, and he covers new media entertainment for "Variety" magazine.
Justin, hello. Thanks for joining us.
JUSTIN OPPELAAR, "VARIETY": Thank you.
KAGAN: Give us some examples of places where it's working, how companies are using -- movie companies are using the Internet to market movies?
OPPELAAR: Sure, well, actually it all kind of -- the dam broke with "The Blair Witch Project."
KAGAN: We have that one. We're going to punch that up.
OPPELAAR: Sure.
KAGAN: This one that you can see at this site, it's "Blair Witch" and for the sequel as well.
OPPELAAR: Basically, that sire came live about a year before the movie came out, a year before anybody new anything about it; back kind of in early days when, if you will recall, people were in a bit of a frenzy as to whether it was true or not. And the story kind of unfolded on the site, and a site which cost about $15,000 to put up ended up generating about 75 million hits a week in run-up to movie.
KAGAN: Can't buy that kind of publicity, I guess.
OPPELAAR: Exactly, and it generated interest at a grassroots level where people could have talked to each other about it, which is paydirt for movie marketing.
KAGAN: So now the standard, if put a movie out, you have to have a Web site?
OPPELAAR: Well, that really opened the floodgates, yes. These sites have become a lot more complex. It's more than just kind of casts lists and stills from the movie. Now, you're seeing video trailers, you're seeing interactive games, you're seeing all kinds of innovative stuff.
KAGAN: We found a fun one that's the Web site for "A.I." -- "Artificial Intelligence" right now.
OPPELAAR: Yes.
KAGAN: I found this -- you can ask questions and you can have a conversation with artificial intelligence. During the commercial break, he told me that his favorite number was 23 and I put in the question, is there life on any other planets besides Earth? So, let's see what the artificial intelligence is going to tells us on that site.
He says, oh, there could be. Well, that's insightful.
OPPELAAR: It's still in a development stage.
KAGAN: It is, but he does have a sense of humor. There were some funny answers he had. He was recommending different bands that I should check out besides this movie. This Web site works. What about "Lord of the Rings"? We're still waiting to see this movie come out.
OPPELAAR: Yes, well, that site's been up for an amazing amount of time, actually. That went up about two years ago, and they've been updating ever since. It's basically kind of a saturation bombing technique just because there's so much interest in this series, there's a huge amount of Tolkiena people that are fans of that series, and they can't seem to get enough.
They're getting on the order of north of 300 million hits a month on that site, and they're updating it constantly and they've got a really kind of a rabid fan base built up. The flip side of that being that there could be some burnout as the movie approaches, if there's so much hype surrounding the site, but to date, it seems like it's still rolling.
KAGAN: And real quickly, let's put the power in the hands of the consumers here. What's a Web site or maybe perhaps a couple of Web sites that consumers can use to help them pick the movies they want to see?
OPPELAAR: Sure, well, of course there's Variety.com.
KAGAN: Get that plug in there, of course.
OPPELAAR: But there's also IMBD, the Internet Movie Database. It's a good site for just kind of general information about all kinds of movies. It's a really, really deep database of information, upcoming movies as well as historical. There's also CountingDown.com. That's an interesting one just for kind of little bits and bobs of information about upcoming movies. And (UNINTELLIGIBLE) is kind of a very popular site for Hollywood insiders for rumors and news coming up for upcoming projects.
KAGAN: Very good, we like that, and we will, of course, check out variety.com. Get your plug in there. Justin Oppelaar from "Variety," thanks for taking us on a the tour of the Web this morning. We appreciate your time.
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