This Ain’t No Playground

They may well be Hollywood’s toughest sell.

So what if Clint, Harrison, Julia or Tom stars in the movie. The magazine cover story publicist Pat Kingsley negotiated to get--the kind where the author describes what it’s like to drive along Sunset Boulevard with Jodie--doesn’t mean squat because they’ll never read it. They could care less about Oscar nominations, two thumbs up or a “Riveting!” from Jeff Craig of the “Sixty Second Preview.”

They are so fickle that the stuff they loved last year they hate now. Their word of mouth can be deadly to a film. Forget about trying to reach them Thursday nights while they are sitting in front of television watching “Seinfeld” and “E.R.” because they are probably in bed and, if they aren’t, they should be. They channel surf a myriad of stations, many on cable. They can go for hours to a place where even the most clever Hollywood marketer can’t reach them: the worlds of Nintendo 64 and PlayStation.

Worse, they don’t even have the final say over what movies they see. They can’t dash out to the movies on impulse because, well, there’s the driver’s license issue.

For all of the millions of dollars Hollywood spends on marketing, the industry has a devil of a time finding, and effectively selling, its new films to your kids. (For that matter, they also find it hard to convince you to take them.) Kids are an elusive bunch. Marketing executives--some of whom were reluctant to speak publicly for fear of inadvertently sounding too condescending toward young audiences--near unanimously expressed frustration with the task of trying to market films to kids.

To keep it simple, kids will be defined here as anyone still in single digits, on the theory that under 10 excludes preteen boys who go to the movies to ogle Neve, and the preteen girls who go to watch Leo save Kate for the seventh time.

Here are a handful of general rules:

1) No amount of marketing, advertising or cheeseburger-kids meal promotions carries more weight than what 9-year-old Justin says about the movie on the playground.

Hollywood marketing executives always go on about how important word of mouth is to the success or failure of any movie. It’s especially true with kids.

“Kids spend a lot of time talking to each other. They can make a movie into something if they think it’s worth talking about. But the talk can be lethal,” said one top marketing executive.

2) No amount of marketing, advertising, cheeseburger-kids meal promotions carries more weight than what 13-year-old Jason, brother of 9-year-old Justin, says about the movie.

Word of mouth among peers is important, but acceptance by older kids is even more so. The PG-13 movie becomes the movie of choice, even for kids whose parents won’t let them near one.

This creates a dilemma for movie marketers: younger kids would rather see movies for older kids. So how do you get them to see “Hercules” when they’d rather see “Men in Black,” or “Quest for Camelot” when “Godzilla” lurks?

“Once kids are 9, becomes critical to them what movies older people are watching,” one studio executive says.

3) Watch for X chromosome ads and Y chromosome ads.

In the best traditions of marketing, Hollywood splices and dices its audience into niches, including kids by sex.

Few did it as much as 20th Century Fox’s first animated feature, “Anastasia,” released over the holidays.

One ad spot was aimed at older girls coming of age in which the narrator talked about how every young girl’s dream is to become a princess. Then there was a softer ad for even younger girls that stressed words like “magic” and “majesty” and showed a lot of dancing.

For boys, one ad made it almost seem as if “Dimitri,” the male love interest, was the center of the movie. The spot was all action, showing him battling the evil Rasputin.

The main difference with a boys trailer or ad: “You try to show more action scenes, more villains and less kissing,” said Cathy Liepe, senior partner with giant ad agency J. Walter Thompson.

4) They’ve got to get adults to the theater as well.

Anyone who sat through “Rock-a-Doodle” or “Thumbelina” knows that, for parents, going to a kids’ movie can be a tossup with a trip to the dentist.

“If it’s a kids’ movie, chances are you may not want to see it,” says a studio marketing executive.

It’s a given in Hollywood that the Disney name and logo is the single most valuable tool in marketing movies to kids, the only real “brand” that carries weight theatrically. But marketing executives believe that mainly applies to parents, who use it as something of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for films.

Kids may want to see a movie, but if the parents don’t go along, the cause is lost for a marketer.

“At the end of the day, you’re the closer. If the kids want to go, and you don’t want to, they can’t do anything about it,” said Paramount Pictures Vice Chairman Rob Friedman.

For other studios, the way to get parents to go is to convince them won’t be so painful--and they might even enjoy it--through “review driven” ads featuring praise from critics.

For “Paulie,” separate ads for adults from studio DreamWorks SKG stressed positive reviews for the film about a parrot. Likewise, one of the ads for “Anastasia” stressed reviews.

5) Desperate kids’ movies use desperate kids’ trailers.

The litmus test after viewing a trailer or commercial for a film should be the following: Is that the best they’ve got?

Animated movies that look like a Disney rip off, trailers for PG movies that look like a two-minute version of “Home Alone” and at least one joke about flatulence are almost always a good tip that the film is a dog.

6) Hollywood has trouble finding your kids.

Amid soccer games, after-school day care and lengthy matches playing “GoldenEye” on Nintendo 64, Hollywood marketing executives are doing everything they can to find your kids.

It’s not as easy as it used to be, when most kids watched Saturday mornings cartoons on one of the three networks.

The proliferation of popular cable channels, notably Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network, along with new networks such as WB, has led to a fragmenting of the kids audience in TV, which remains the only real effective place for movie marketers to sell to kids.

“There are still some perennials, like Saturday mornings,” said Sandy Reisenbach, Warner Bros. executive vice president for marketing and planning. “You can reach still them, but you have to market more.”

7) Even when Hollywood finds your kids, their hands are somewhat tied.

Networks and cable channels have lots of restrictions on materials that can go into commercials for kids’ movies. The edgy stuff is out, so is violence.

Then there’s research, something Hollywood spends a fortune on. It has little to say about what kids want to see.

Hollywood likes “Tracking.” It’s the research method in which telephone surveys just before a film opens try to gauge how many people are likely to get in a car, drive to the theater to see a movie. But tracking rarely measures what kids below 8 years old plan to see.

Although there is some research done among kids (kindergarten-like exercises in which pre-selected kids attend a test screening, then check off happy faces when they like something, and sad faces when they don’t), studio executives believe much of the research on kids is useless.

One reason is obvious: Ask yourself what you would do if a stranger called your home one night wanting to quiz your kids about what movies they want to see.

8) No fast-food tie-in guarantees that your kid will want to see a film.

“The Pebble and the Penguin” had a fast-food tie-in with Taco Bell, and look what it did. It’s not alone.

Says JWT’s Liepe: “A good tie-in doesn’t save a bad movie.”

Likewise, one might think that Disney’s elaborate and lengthy alliance with McDonald’s--the nation’s biggest fast-food chain by far--would guarantee a huge box-office result. But the studio’s recent animated features haven’t come close to matching the success of films such as “The Lion King” and “Aladdin,” when the studio had its tie-in with Burger King.

9) It helps to have radio airplay.

If the song “Looking Through Your Eyes” by teen country superstar LeAnn Rimes isn’t familiar yet, give it a couple of weeks.

It’s one of the marketing linchpins of Warner Bros.’ “Quest for Camelot,” and will be played again and again and again.

It’s also in the best interests of corporate synergy for this marketing machine to hit on all cylinders: Rimes records for Curb Records, which is affiliated with Atlantic Records, which, like Warner Bros., is part of Time Warner Inc.

It didn’t hurt that songs from “The Lion King” were all over the radio, or that kids after a couple of weeks knew the words to “A Whole New World” from “Aladdin.”

To prove the point, here’s a test: name at least two of the songs from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which didn’t perform nearly as well as other Disney animated films that included a batch of songs you probably know by heart.

10) In the end, it’s hard to dupe kids.

Movie marketers know that kids have a built-in antenna for bad movies, or something they’ve seen before. Witness Disney’s challenge to keep its animated movies fresh amid tailing off box office performance and competition from new players in animated films such as Fox, Warner Bros. and DreamWorks.

As Warner Bros.’ Reisenbach’s puts it: “Reaching kids is one thing, selling them is another. Kids are certainly hipper than they were even three or four years ago. They are much more discriminating, and they know when you’re trying to fool them.”

Or, as DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press, puts it more succinctly: “Kids can smell a turkey.”