A Fairy Tale Ending: The Entertainment Marketing Awards

Things are looking very green this year.

Never before has one property so thoroughly dominated PROMO’s Entertainment Marketing Awards the way DreamWorks SKG’s Shrek oozed its way through much of this year’s program.

OK, so that statement borders on hyperbole. The EMMAs are, after all, only four years old. But the film and its subsequent video release produced a lot of firsts for our little program:

• It was the first time tie-ins from one property earned awards in three categories — Best Overall, Best Feature Film, and Best Home Video. EMMA’s first triple play.

• It also was the first time one marketing partner scored two awards. Baskin-Robbins fattened up both its 2001 schedule and its mantelpiece by serving two healthy portions of Shrek this year (thereby producing a double-dose of accolades as well for its agency, Norm Marshall & Associates).

• It also was the first time EMMA and Oscar have seen eye to eye: Shrek took home an Academy Award this year as Best Animated Film. (Just to cover our bases, we’ll note that Titanic scored a Best Home Video nod the year after it took Oscar home.)

Does Oscar glory make EMMA victory a bit ho-hum? Not according to the marketing people at DreamWorks, who get to accept their very own trophies when we formally present the awards this month at Star Power. (Check out the brochure at the end of this section for more details on the conference.)

That, of course, is why we conduct this program in the first place. There are other avenues through which the directors, producers, actors, singers, musicians, and other assorted talent who make entertainment such a wonderful diversion can receive praise. But there’s no other venue for the marketers, who usually are the first to be blamed for the bombs but the last to be lauded for the hits.

And there’s a reason why movie studios spend an average of $31 million to market a new release — and enlist brand partners to spend as much as five times that amount to bolster their efforts. (And why their peers in the TV, video, and music industries devote as much time and energy to marketing as the studios do.) It’s because marketing is nearly as vital to the cause as any other part of the creative process.

And that’s why EMMA was born. We hope you enjoy reading about this year’s list of winners.

Just watch out for all that sludge.

PROMO would like to thank the following companies for supporting this year’s EMMA presentation:

EMI Capitol
EMP
Javelin
Hollywood Movie Magic
National Cinema Network
Promotion Marketing Association
The Properties Group