The Message Is The Media; Q&a With Mike Kaiser, Adam Fogelson, Barbara Glazer, Tim Nett And Mark...

Competition, noise level, new technologies and innovations — these are all preoccupations for both veterans and newcomers in Hollywood, and few are more preoccupied than those who deal with trailers and key art for upcoming films. How does one get their message across? Stephen Galloway for The Hollywood Reporter sat down recently with advertising and marketing veterans Mike Kaiser, partner/creative director of Concept Arts; Adam Fogelson, president of marketing at Universal; Barbara Glazer, co-CEO of the Ant Farm; Tim Nett, CEO of Trailer Park; and Mark Trugman, CEO of Aspect Ratio, to learn what has been on their minds lately.

The Hollywood Reporter: What is the biggest challenge facing your side of the business today?

Adam Fogelson: As an industry, we are all making so much noise that distinguishing your product from all the choices out there has become increasingly difficult. It is more than ever about strategy, finding a way to convince a certain motivateable group of people that the movie you are offering has a reason to be seen.



THR: Has that challenge changed from 20 years ago?

Tim Nett: I don't think the challenge has changed. We still have the same job of telling people what the movie is and who's in it and what it's about. But it's about getting the message across to an audience that is very jaded. It used to be that you could put something on the major shows and that would be great, but with the explosion of cable, finding all your audience is increasingly difficult.

Fogelson: You used to be able to buy an "event" presence in the marketplace. A few times a year, a film would spend so much money marketing itself that just by virtue of being perceived as that big, people would care. You can't buy that anymore.



THR: What else has changed?

Mark Trugman: Twenty years ago, we were much more intuitive in the way we created advertising. We did have market research, but I don't think that people followed it as closely as they do now.



THR: Is that a good thing or not?

Trugman: Good research can be a terrific tool. In the wrong hands, it can send you down a lot of paths that eat up a lot of time and money.

Fogelson: The headline of most research will start by telling you how you can make a piece of advertising appeal to more people. But trying to appeal to more people isn't always the answer …

Trugman: … Because that makes it more homogenized.

Fogelson: When we created the red-band (R-rated) trailer for the first "American Pie" (in 1999), research was very clear that a high school senior having relations with a pie, while funny to some, was so entirely disturbing to others that if you took it out, more people would care (about seeing the movie). Instead of 45% of people saying they are definitely interested in this movie, 60% of people will. But we thought, if you keep that scene, the 45% of people who say they are definitely interested will rearrange their entire schedule to see this film.

Trugman: Research is very good at letting you know what you've done wrong, and sometimes it is very good at letting you know what you've done right. There have been times when we have found out a lot of interesting things — not necessarily in the topline data, but when you go in and read the adjective selections.



THR: Is there any particular aspect of research that you find especially useful?

Nett: One of the things I find most useful is focus groups because in focus groups people at least tell you what they think in a way that you don't have to interpret.



THR: Moving away from that to some recent films, what in the advertising campaigns of Lion's Gate's "Fahrenheit 9/11" and Newmarket's "The Passion of the Christ" made them so successful?

Mike Kaiser: It was more the publicity than the advertising in both cases. We happened to do the poster and print ads for "Passion," and as much as I'd like to take credit, just because we put a fancy title treatment against a stone background and took a shot of a guy with a crown of thorns, I don't think that had a hell of a lot to do with it.



THR: Have cable and the Internet made your jobs harder?

Trugman: I don't think so. The competitive marketplace has made our jobs more difficult; I think there is much more pressure at the studio end, and they are under much more scrutiny now (from their corporate bosses). And the technology has made our jobs vastly more complicated, because we can do things more quickly. Because of that, in the near future, people are going to start thinking about ways to do more specific types of targeting. With digital projection, people are talking about creating trailers and changing them within a day or two if the trailer doesn't play very well.



THR: Has the growing importance of the international market affected your work?

Barbara Glazer: It depends on the movie. We have trailers, now, for both international and domestic on certain films that are going in two different directions. Sometimes the international people have something better than the domestic people and that can shake things up.

Fogelson: As we were working on (2003's) "The Hulk," there were very interesting conversations, in particular with people in Japan, about that specific character. Everything about "The Hulk" is completely contrary to what is socially acceptable in that country. A character who acts out in the most aggressive public way possible — it just couldn't be more contrary. That creates a fairly interesting challenge. That kind of thing happens all the time. On (2002's) "The Bourne Identity," Franka Potente was put in the movie in part because of her international appeal, and was much more featured in the campaign internationally than domestically. Sometimes, it is as simple as that.

Kaiser: In Japan, facial hair is not considered attractive, so when we did "The Postman" poster for Japan (in 1997), you had to show Kevin Costner without the beard, even though he had a beard in the film.



THR: That brings up the notion of truth in advertising. How much can you bend the truth?

Glazer: A lot of it has to do with the filmmakers involved and the studio standing behind a film or not. But sometimes you are put into a room and someone says, "OK, I don't want you to lie, but I want you to bring out this element and this element."

Nett: I don't think we lie as much as we highlight points of the movie that are maybe more minor.

Fogelson: I don't think it is any different (from other advertising), save for the fact that our business is remarkably public. It is pretty hard to boldfaced lie anymore. There are whole industries that do nothing but report on our business.



THR: Looking back over the past year, what has struck you as especially innovative in movie advertising?

Fogelson: Innovation for the sake of innovation is dumb. The campaign we had for (1999's) "Man on the Moon" was incredibly innovative — we had the screen rolling during spots, spots that ended in the middle. It didn't help. That film wildly underperformed. While I am proud of the artistry, I am not proud of the results.

Glazer: When I saw the trailer for (New Line's) "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," which Tim's company did, I was really blown away by it. Now, I've seen it imitated so many times, I am nauseous.

Fogelson: Fox in the last few months has done a really good job, not necessarily in creative advertising, but with this idea to put themselves in mall space in more aggressive ways (by signing a deal with one of the mall companies). That was very smart and forward-thinking.



THR: Looking ahead over the next five years or so, how will the advertising landscape change?

Trugman: I think it is going to be more targeted. People are going to be asking, how do you reach that end user more effectively? And I don't know if that is direct-mail DVDs, or finding out what the power of the Internet is, because people are still trying to figure that out. There are a lot of companies now that are developing huge mailing lists and they know who's buying tickets. I can't imagine people won't want to start thinking about those things.

Kaiser: The economics of the business are going to drive the way marketing is done, and it is conceivable that five years from now the weight of revenue is going to shift so much to ancillary and international and away from theatrical that this is going to drive the way advertising is created. If you are selling 90% of your product in Brazil, you are going to start making your spots in Portuguese.

Nett: The technology is going to constantly evolve. I am waiting for the day when I can see a spot on my phone, which is not that far away.