Hollywood is reaching audiences on their mobile phones

Back in the early ’50s, when television was starting to eat Hollywood’s lunch in audience numbers, someone thought up the slogan, “Movies are better than ever.”

Movies today may be a lot of superlatives — louder? longer? — but one claim is undeniable: They’re more mobile than ever. While other categories still treat mobile as an afterthought, mobile marketing is becoming a mainstay of film promotion.

One reason, quite simply, is that the handset does almost everything a PC browser can do — but outdoors. Folks out looking for entertainment can be influenced more directly via mobile than they might be by a TV spot or an online ad back at home. They’re a few steps closer to a purchase — literally, since many movie mobile ads include a theater locator or a link to a Web ticket sales agent.

“What the movie marketers want to do is drive people into the theaters,” says Dea Lawrence, vice president of West Coast sales for rich media ad platform PointRoll, which created a mobile campaign for “Burn After Reading,” last year’s Coen Brothers film. “If you’re already on your phone and interacting with a movie theater ad, you’re much more likely to click through to purchase tickets immediately. It’s a more direct response.”

But of course, users are looking for more than just movie times and locations from their mobile phones. For their part, studios are as interested in generating pre-release buzz as they are in getting butts into seats once a movie is in theaters.

Last fall, three weeks before the release of its suspense thriller “Eagle Eye,” Paramount Pictures teased the movie with an engaging interactive mobile game. Designed and executed by Millennial Media, the “Eagle Eye Mobile Challenge” campaign used banner ads and a chance to win a $1,000 Circuit City gift card to get users to click through to a mobile landing page.

There, users were asked to enter their mobile phone numbers to enter the sweepstakes (and, incidentally, to opt in to future text messages from Paramount). Just like the movie’s hero, they then received a call from a mysterious female saying that their lives were in danger and giving them instructions via text message on how to elude capture — including inputting the phone numbers of up to five friends who could join in the mobile game.

The payoff was a screen that promised that “all will be revealed,” and reminded users of the movie’s release date. Users who opted in got one final call from the mystery woman the day before “Eagle Eye” opened reminding them of the movie’s release.

Metrics from the campaign included ad clickthroughs, how many users submitted phone numbers to enter, initial call receipts, responses to the mystery caller, total and averages of the friend forwards, and how many of those then opted in to the game.

“We had a lot of data we could capture to show how engaged initial users were and how viral the campaign was,” says Eric Eller, Millennial’s marketing senior vice president. While not giving specific metrics, he says that all the results were “very, very strong.”

Movie games like the “Eagle Eye Mobile Challenge” have to be simpler than their Web counterparts; the handset environment — a smaller screen, a keypad rather than a keyboard, the habit of consuming mobile in snack-size bites over time — means trading off some engagement for ease of use.

“The concept we originally proposed had 10 steps, but when we finally went to market it was more like four,” Eller says. “We simplified it so that the majority of users could make it to the end and receive that last message about the opening date.”

That problem may have a solution: the iPhone and its smart counterparts, whose larger screen, better video resolution and downloadable storage promise to open new possibilities for marketing movies on the handset.

Last fall, PointRoll delivered the first rich media iPhone ad, to sell “Burn After Reading.” Rich media allows users to expand an ad, view video or download items such as coupons, all without clicking away from the Web site they were on originally. That makes the ad more alluring for mobile users, who are often time-pressed and reluctant to click away from their destination site.

“The movie had a cast of multiple stars, and the thrust of the ad was to allow you to watch video for each one,” PointRoll’s Lawrence says. “The iPhone psychographic was definitely a target for that movie.”

Because the iPhone is built with GPS inside, users could go on to look up nearby theater listings.

The iPhone’s downloadable applications can also provide ad inventory for marketers. That was the approach taken last December by agency The Hyperfactory in its mobile campaign around “Notorious,” the Fox Searchlight biopic of rapper Biggie Smalls. In its first mobile campaign for a movie, Hyperfactory placed pre-roll video ads for the picture within the iPhone’s vSnax app. Users who used the free app to watch short clips from media partners such as VH1, Spike TV and CBS.com saw 15-second video ads for “Notorious” in front of most content skewed to a young or urban audience.

The Hyperfactory also ran mobile banners within the free Pandora music application on iPhone.

“Users have to sign up for Pandora and input their age into a profile,” says Nicole Amodeo, vice president of media for The Hyperfactory. “We were able to target the ad to users ages 18 to 34, as well as to those who were listening to the rap and hip-hop genres. So we could use mobile to extend their view of the video trailer.”

Digital agency Avatar Labs created a free game download for the iPhone to promote the recent Disney animated film “Bolt.” Using the motion sensor in the handset, users can steer Rhino, the hamster sidekick, through several levels of a 3-D city environment. Users can also save their scores and click to view either the TV ad or the movie’s theatrical trailer.

“It’s the thermonuclear device of mobile movie marketing,” Rex Cook, executive creative director at Avatar, says of the iPhone. By mid-January, the game had 1.1 million downloads from the iPhone App Store.

At press time, Avatar was uploading another movie promotion to the App Store to market an upcoming release in the “Friday the 13th” franchise: one that turns users’ iPhones into virtual machetes that play gory sound effects and users’ own recorded screams when they “stab” with the handsets.

“It’s really simple, but really fun,” Cook says.

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Go to promomagazine.com/mobilemarketing for more on marketing on mobile phones including:

• Clips from mobile trailers
• Movie game demos
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