A few years back I was running the Media and Entertainment vertical at Google.The streaming revolution had just started in the country, every legacy media company now wanted to launch an OTT. Business was good.
But there was still a part of my portfolio that was stubbornly old – fashioned in its adoption of digital marketing. The cultural and creative bellwether for the Indian entertainment industry – Movies.Yes, Bollywood, and all the assorted movie industries across different regions were united in one thing, apparently – their distrust of digital marketing.
The reasons were manifold, but at the core it was this – Marketing for movies was always considered superfluous and a necessary evil. So, even the few $ that were spent on marketing had to be ‘most visible’. And by visible, I mean, visible to the producers and the actors. Hence, TV and outdoors ruled the roost in movie marketing.
There were many pitches, multiple meetings, forced movie screenings and some even entertaining script readings. While movie studios were always keen to partner with Google for something ‘innovative’, they remained stubbornly traditional with their media allocation.
So, how did we change this? How did we go from here to Youtube becoming the most favoured marketing channel? Hey, I didn’t say it, just the leading economic daily did:)
The Youtube Box Office predictor
Simple. We stopped selling Youtube. Instead, we built a truly customer-first tool called the Box office predictor.This tool would be able to predict with a 92% accuracy how much a movie would open to – based on the analysis of the views and watchtime on the trailer.
This changed everything.
Every movie studio worth its salt wanted to work with the Google team. Our teams were barely able to keep up with the demand for meetings. But here’s the most interesting part of the story: Nobody wants to hear about a problem without a solution.Almost every meeting with a demo of the predictor ended up being a meeting about how Youtube could help improve their box office collections.
There was one more effect :When the Youtube BO predictor became the de-facto for the industry, digital marketing also became mainstream.Over the course of a year, most studios had shifted a significant chunk of their budgets to digital video.
What did we learn: Sometimes, not selling is the best way to sell.
