Selling Movies Takes Creativity, Delicacy, Savvy--and Oodles of Money

MGM wanted just the right image for the film “Moonstruck.” So it paid people to sit around and select an upbeat poster for the movie. MGM, however, was told exactly what it didn’t want to hear.

Some of the people said they liked that now-familiar image of the film’s star, Cher, prancing in the moonlight. But most of them said they preferred the image of Cher and her family sitting around the kitchen table.

“It was a tough decision,” said Greg Morrison, president of worldwide marketing for MGM. “We had the focus group telling us to go with the image of the family, but we decided to go with Cher. Happily, it’s all coming up roses.”

While all may be roses for “Moonstruck”--which last week received six Oscar nominations--the business of advertising films is also full of thorns. Advertising executives find themselves dealing with huge studio bureaucracies, intense egos and products that you can’t eat, wear or wash.

“You are asking people to leave the security of their homes and sit in a darkened room with a bunch of people they don’t know,” said Anthony Goldschmidt, president of Intralink Film Graphic Design Ltd. “And we’re asking people to pay for it . . .

“In our business,” he said, “we market products that won’t clean your toilet bowl better or make your shirts whiter. All we have to market is emotion.”

Emotions aside, Paramount Pictures made a major business decision last week when it handed its estimated $70-million advertising placement business to a new ad shop. Similarly, just four months ago, Walt Disney Co. also took its film advertising account to a new agency.

When an ad firm gets a big new account, it generally handles the entire marketing campaign--the slogans, the commercials, sometimes even the name of the product itself. But not in Hollywood.

The main job for the new agencies handling Paramount and Disney is to identify the best spots to place ads and buy the necessary television time or print media space. While relying on big-name ad firms to buy their advertising time, the movie makers usually look to little specialty shops to create most of their ads.

More than a dozen advertising and marketing companies may work on a single film, executives say. One outfit creates newspaper ads. Another may edit those “coming attractions” trailers. Yet another designs posters.

This is all very different from what ad agencies usually do for most major advertisers. When car makers or fast-food companies switch ad agencies, the public soon sees big changes in its ads. For example, Nissan’s current ad campaign about how its cars are “built for the human race” is a far cry from past ads about how its cars “make you feel like driving.” That is the direct result of a recent ad agency change.

Film executives say the reason they turn to specialty shops for ads is simple. While Madison Avenue is great at building long-term image campaigns for products such as dog food and diapers, it seldom knows what to do with less tangible products such as movies. Films, after all, can’t be called “new and improved,” and their shelf lives are measured in days instead of years.

“I thought I knew what pressure was when I worked on the Ford account at J. Walter Thompson,” said Intralink’s Goldschmidt. “But I never knew what last-minute pressure was until I got into the business of advertising movies.”

There was plenty of pressure at five Los Angeles ad firms last week, while executives waited to hear who had won the Paramount business. The big winner was the Los Angeles office of the ad firm D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. Last October, Western International Media picked up the lucrative Disney account. Last week’s loser was the ad firm that goes by the name AC&R;/DHB & Bess, which had handled much of Paramount’s business for the past 18 years.

Already, D’Arcy has new notions of how to market some of Paramount’s upcoming films. Among the movies is the yet-to-be-titled “Crocodile Dundee” sequel. “Although TV remains the most important medium” for film advertising, said Jim Helin, managing director at D’Arcy, “there’s a mandate now for innovation.”

D’Arcy looked beyond television when it sought to build interest in another client’s film, “The River’s Edge.” In an effort to reach teen-agers, D’Arcy bought advertising time on electronic TV screens in shopping mall kiosks nationwide.

For its part, Western has been turning more and more to cable television, where channels like MTV are quick to reach teens, said Larry Olshan, executive vice president at Western.

The ad agencies also have to be able to respond quickly to box-office bonanzas and to events like the Oscars.

Long before Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep last week received best actor and best actress nominations for the film “Ironweed,” an ad boasting about the nominations had been created. “All the major film companies had ads set to go before the nominations came out,” said Jack Brodsky, marketing consultant for Taft/Barish Productions, which produced “Ironweed.” “It’s just a question of what number to slap in the ads.”

Of course, the motive behind all these ads is competition. A total of 511 films were released domestically last year, compared to 472 in 1986, according to the trade magazine, Variety. Film companies spent more than $230 million hyping their movies on television, radio and in magazines over the first nine months of 1987, according to Leading National Advertisers, a New York firm that tracks advertiser spending.

Consider that advertising budgets for some films can rival--or exceed--the cost of the films themselves. Before “Moonstruck’s” run is over, MGM expects to spend $10 million on marketing a film that cost $11 million to make. Last year, Disney spent $3.9 million to advertise the re-release of “Snow White,” a film it made in 1937 for $1.5 million.

That’s one reason that so-called man-in-the-movie house ads--which feature real interviews with moviegoers--are increasingly popular with the film industry. One such spot for “Moonstruck” was recently assembled from interviews at the AMC Theater in Century City and another movie house in New York City. The handful of people who eventually appear in the ad were culled from a total of 50 to 60 interviews, estimates Morrison.

To increase the public’s curiosity about the 1982 blockbuster “E.T.,” Goldschmidt’s firm created posters and ads that did not even show the creature E.T. Most recently, Intralink created print ads for the film “Ironweed,” that, once again, do not show the faces of stars Nicholson and Streep.

All of this, however, is a very delicate creative process. The ads often require approval of everyone from the chairmen of the movie companies to the stars themselves. Some ad executives don’t like to admit it. But, said Western’s Olshan, agencies that create film studio ads must keep one thing in mind: “Our clients are in a much more creative business than we are.”

Gerber Tries to Crack the Apple Juice Market

When the word Gerber comes to mind, so does the word baby. Right?

After all, for 60 years Gerber Products Co. has reminded people in its corporate slogan, “Babies are our business.” Now, however, the Fremont, Mich., company has big notions of making grown-ups its business, too. Early next month on the West Coast, Gerber plans to market a 25-ounce plastic jug of Apple Juice. Unlike most other Gerber products, however, this one won’t have the smiling Gerber baby on it. Instead, it will have a picture of a smiling child. And the juice won’t just be sold in the baby section of the supermarket, either. It will also be sold in the juice section.

Will grown-ups buy Gerber for themselves? If the past is any indication of the future, Gerber has its work cut out for itself. After all, over the years Gerber has attempted to market other family-oriented products such as peanut butter, ketchup and even fruit desserts. None of them got past the test-market stage, said Kay Fryling, a company spokeswoman.

Will apple juice be the product that eventually changes the company’s 6-decades-old marketing philosophy? Said the spokeswoman: “We’ll have to make that decision if and when that time comes.”

Chiat/Day Creates a Direct-Mail Unit

Over the years, the ad firm Chiat/Day has made oddball TV commercials for Apple Computer and unusual billboards for Nike. But the Los Angeles ad firm has done very little in one of the fastest-growing areas of advertising--direct mail.

So on Monday, Chiat/Day said it has formed a division that will be in charge of creating everything from direct-mail advertisements to discount coupons for its clients. That subsidiary, Perkins/Butler Inc., will have offices in both Los Angeles and New York.

The division is named after the two men who will head it up. Bill Butler, who just joined Chiat/Day from the direct-market specialty firm Wunderman Worldwide, will be creative director of the subsidiary. And Bob Perkins, who has been with the ad firm since 1984, will be president of the division. Its first task is to create direct-mail advertising for recently acquired client National Car Rental. And up the road: perhaps some direct mail ads for Chiat/Day’s biggest client, Nissan.