Blue Jeans Hosts “Making Movies More than Film: Marketing to a Modern Audience” Panel at Sundance

Last year was a huge year for Hollywood. In 2014, film marketing drew a major spotlight with movies like “The Interview” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” garnering new levels of mainstream attention. While these movies reached infamy for a myriad of reasons, what really makes a film succeed or fail? Blue Jeans Network sat down with a panel of top industry executives at the Sundance Film Festival last week to answer that question and understand how marketers are adapting and evolving their efforts to reach the modern audience. The “Making Movies More than Film: Marketing to a Modern Audience” panel featured a diverse group of producers, publicists and media professionals including Jacob Patrick, Mark Cartier, Ross Anderson, Maria Lopez-Knowles and Daniela Syrovy.

With an in-person audience of 100 attendees and remote participants who joined via Blue Jeans Primetime, the panel discussed topics ranging from multicultural behavior targeting to crowdsourcing to big data. While there are endless factors that go into making a film succeed, the overarching theme between speakers stressed the importance of understanding your audience and knowing how to creatively reach them. For the film industry, social media has become the go-to platform to engage with audiences and craft the perfectly personalized experience to connect someone to a film. One panelist suggested that it’s even gone as far as actors landing movie roles because of their notable social media followings.

The topic of Hollywood stars opened up the audience discussion, and the first remote Primetime viewer asked if the evolution of technology could open up two-way communication for celebrities and fans. The panel experts agreed that this was already taking effect and would not only grow in popularity with advances in tech, but may eventually be contractual. A panel member noted that videoconferencing could become an exciting and fresh avenue to reach millennials. From the panel’s perspective, an evolved press conference or movie screening over video conferencing was not only more cost effective, but it could also engage a larger fan base.

“The biggest change I’ve seen is that at first it was just about storytelling – if you build it they will come. Now we can interact directly with the consumer and directly and digitally communicate with the people who are watching our movies or TV shows and create something individually for them, that’s really exciting,” said Mark Cartier, development executive for Beowulf and Lars and the Real Girl.

Video conferencing is finding its home in the sports industry with live press conferences after games, and the possibilities are endless if Hollywood follows suit. Blue Jeans and Sundance demonstrated what that could look like at this year’s festival with a live Q&A broadcasted to remote High Tech High students following an exclusive screening of “Most Likely to Succeed.”  If there was one thing that was clear from the panel, bringing an audience into a creative and compelling story as a participant trumps any kind of publicity stunt.

You can watch a short excerpt from the panel here or watch the entire discussion via this link .