Dawn of a new sales technique for films

In the never-ending quest for a box office splash, movie marketers are testing a new variation of an old concept -- the “sneak preview.” Before “Dawn of the Dead” and “Taking Lives” hit the theaters next Friday, consumers can sample uncut sequences of both without buying a ticket or even leaving the house.

In a first, Universal Pictures will show the opening 10 minutes of its horror remake of “Dawn of the Dead” on the USA Network Monday night. And beginning today, Warner Bros. is showing the first nine minutes and eight seconds of its star-driven thriller “Taking Lives” online at Yahoo! Movies until the film opens.

While the use of television for this form of marketing is unprecedented, Yahoo! Movies, with 9.4 million visitors a month, is fast becoming a tool of choice for studios. In the past two years, the website has been used to show the first seven to 10 minutes of such films as “The Cooler,” “28 Days Later,” “Cabin Fever,” “Darkness Falls,” “Confidence” and “Brown Sugar.” (In 1999, “The Blair Witch Project” was the first film to significantly and successfully employ the Internet for marketing.)

“The Internet is a terrific way of sampling the product,” said Nancy Utley, president of marketing for Fox Searchlight, which distributed “28 Days Later” and “Brown Sugar.” “Trailers are powerful tools, but moviegoers recognize they are heavily edited. They feel it’s clever marketing but not really representative of the product. It’s hard to argue with that. What Universal is doing is pushing this idea further, and I think it’s very smart.”

The telecast, which will be shown during the last commercial break of the horror-thriller “Final Destination” (between 10 and 10:30 p.m.), will give USA Network viewers a taste of the zombie horror flick, said Adam Fogelson, president of marketing for Universal Pictures. The studio’s executives had been looking for new strategies to market movies for the past two years, but no movie filled the bill for this type of television debut, he said.

“Even great movies don’t have relatively manageable chunks of time that encapsulate all of the great elements of that film,” Fogelson said. “You’ll get a scene that is dramatic or funny or scary, but it’s rare to have a 10-minute chunk that is a good example of what the whole movie experience is. The section that we have here has all of the elements, the style, the attitude, the storytelling and the action.” The segment -- to be preceded by a warning to viewers that the clip from the R-rated film contains graphic violence -- ends with a cliffhanger meant to drive viewers to theaters next week.

Michele Ganeless, executive vice president and general manager of USA Networks, hopes the campaign will persuade other studios to promote their films creatively on television.

The “Dawn of the Dead” experiment “speaks to the fact that viewers have gotten savvy to the trailer showing the best pieces of a movie,” Ganeless said. “The use of the Internet is so prolific now, but you have to take an active role to go on the Internet and go to a specific site and play that clip. The role of the TV viewer is more passive. It’s a bigger sampling because we’re giving everybody access without having to do anything other than turn on USA.”

It may be simpler to turn on the tube, but surveys show that core moviegoing audiences (ages 12 to 34) spend more time surfing the Internet than watching television. Because of the fierce competition to land a box office hit in a short period of time, the producers of “Taking Lives” felt an unconventional advertising campaign to attract young viewers was in order. In addition to the Yahoo! preview, Warner Bros. will sneak preview the movie in theaters this weekend.

“It’s funny how the mother of invention comes from pressures or other things that are not anticipated,” said “Taking Lives” producer Mark Canton. “We are aware that the impact in everyone’s home of the Internet is large. We figured we could expand our opportunity in the 18-to-30 marketplace by tapping into something they do at some point of every day.”

A psychological thriller, “Taking Lives” is the story of an FBI agent who becomes involved with her key witness while tracking a serial killer who assumes the identities of the people he kills. The sequence viewers can sample on movies.yahoo.com sets the story in motion by recounting details of a serial killer’s first crime.

Whether it’s an uncut run on TV or a sample on the Internet, movie marketing executives are clearly searching for visibility in the marketplace. “We’re all buying television ads and outdoor billboards and trailers in theaters, which result not just in clutter in theaters but also clutter in the airwaves,” said Dawn Taubin, president of marketing for Warner Bros. Pictures. “The trend we’re seeing is in the openness of looking at other ideas.”