Marketing to Moviegoers

Preface

 

When I was a cub reporter in the early 1980s, I broke into business covering Hollywood as an epochal shift engulfed movie marketing. The incumbent film executives had spent their entire careers in publicity with an emphasis on newspapers for both advertising and publicity efforts. In the late 1970s, shifts in the core movie business gradually made television advertising the centerpiece of marketing.

The major studios began importing marketing executives from the packaged-goods business, literally plucking them off of Madison Avenue. The very insular old-timers were suddenly working shoulder-to-shoulder with younger and more worldly newcomers who alone seemed to hold the key to the magic of the television medium. Yet, the old-timers ...