Selling a movie used to be a snap. You printed a poster,
ran trailers in theaters and carpet-bombed NBC’s Thursday night lineup with ads.
Today, that kind of campaign would get a movie marketer fired. The dark art of
movie promotion increasingly lives on the Web, where studios are playing a wilier
game, using social media and a blizzard of other inexpensive yet effective online
techniques to pull off what may be the marketer’s ultimate trick: persuading fans to
persuade each other.
The art lies in allowing fans to feel as if they are discovering a film, but in truth
Hollywood’s new promotional paradigm involves a digital hard sell in which little is
left to chance — as becomes apparent in a rare step-by-step tour through the
timetable and techniques used by Lionsgate to assure that “The Hunger Games”
becomes a box office phenomenon when it opens on Friday.