How Avatar followed the Seth Godin playbook to $1B in 17 days

January 3, 2010 | 3 Comments

Last night I went to watch Avatar with my younger brother, Tim. The first theater was sold out so we yelled to everyone still streaming in and we all quickly drove to the next closest theater, 10 miles away.

Don’t worry if you haven’t seen the film. There are no real spoilers below, just how Avatar followed Seth Godin’s marketing advice to create a blockbuster movie that has already grossed over $1 billion dollars worldwide in just 17 days.

1) Remarkable Matters


Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow in 2003. Those who read it and followed the advice have reaped rewards. Avatar is “remarkable”, defined by Seth simply as something worth remarking on. I’m not a huge moviegoer – maybe average or slightly below – but more than fifty people had remarked about Avatar to me, either in person or online. People whose opinion I respect raved about it on twitter.

I didn’t go see Avatar because I saw a great preview, commercial or billboard. I went because people I trust remarked on it.

When a product is remarkable, it markets itself.

2) In a world of unlimited choice, it’s more important than ever to be the best in the world


In The Dip, Seth Godin writes about strategic quitting and the importance of being the best in the world.

Most studios wouldn’t take a chance on making a $237 million film whose biggest star is Sigourney Weaver.

They did because the man behind the entire operation (writer, director, producer) is James Cameron, arguably the best in the world at what he does. His previous film, Titanic, was the largest grossing film ever – grossing $1.84 billion dollars, 68% more than Lord of the Rings at $1.13 billion.

You don’t have to be James Cameron, but you do have to be the best in the world at what you do (or one of the best). The good news is, you get to define the world. You could be the best plumber in Omaha, Nebraska. You could be the best hiking guide in Colorado. You could be the best blogger about coffee.

Define your world and then work to be the best.

3) Tribes

Titanic appealed to the tribe of history buffs. Avatar appealed to a few different tribes, but specifically to the science fiction tribe. Any self-identified member of the sci-fi tribe will see the movie and they will talk about it. Some will go with other members of the sci-fi tribe but many will bring friends and family.

Sci-fi was a specific tribe that Avatar reached.

4) Free Prize Inside


In Free Prize Inside, Seth explains the importance of “soft innovations”.

Soft innovations are the clever, insightful, useful small ideas that just about anyone in an organization can think up. Soft innovations can make your product into a Purple Cow, they can make it remarkable. They do this by solving a problem that’s peripheral to what your product is ostensibly about. It’s a second reason to buy the thing, and perhaps a first reason to talk about it. It may seem like a gimmick, but soon, what seems like a gimmick becomes an essential element in your product or service.

Avatar is being shown in 2D and in 3D. Olivier Blanchard and others on twitter told me that seeing it in 3D is a must. They were right and seeing the amazing visual effects in 3D gives me something else to talk about as I recommend the movie.

3D was Avatar’s Free Prize Inside.

I don’t know if James Cameron has ever met or even heard of Seth Godin. It doesn’t matter. In creating and marketing Avatar, Cameron took pages directly from Seth’s playbook.

The result? Seventeen days after release, Avatar is already the 4th highest grossing movie ever.

How can you apply these tactics to your project, business or personal brand?

50 Extraordinary Billboards

October 17, 2009 | 1 Comment

Interruption marketing rarely works. Permission marketing is always better.

I honestly believe that most people can’t remember a single billboard they saw in the last week.

Can you?

What if you saw these billboards? Whether you want to buy the product or not, would you at least point it out to anyone else in your vehicle? Would you tell your friends?

[I think some are probably Photoshopped but most are real.]

Ponds Pores

Tylenol

Formula

Full list of all 50 on Johnson Koh’s blog here.

Pantene's Extraordinary Ad

October 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Pantene

Three more magazines folded last week, including Gourmet, one of my favorites.

Traditional advertising is dying.

This isn’t traditional advertising.

Anyone need a cape?

July 25, 2009 | 2 Comments

A great example of one store who really understands marketing.

brooklyn-superhero-supply-co

The typography.

The store layout.

The consistent story.

The treatment of customers like the superheros.

The absence of fear of lawsuits claiming that their invisibility paint doesn’t really make you invisible.

The fact that the the store is a clever front for the non-profit (youth orientated) creative writing and tutoring center, 826NYC. To enter 826NYC, you actually have to go through a swinging bookcase in the BBS store. Proceeds from the BBS store fund 826NYC directly to help young people with their creative writing skills.

Awesome. I know where I’m buying my next cape.

Image credit: dels from a tribe called next.

Stacy's scraps

July 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Stacy's Pita

Stacy Madison and Mark Andrus were fresh out of graduate school and wanted to open a restaurant in downtown Boston, but the zeroes on their student loan debt and a lack of capital put a hold on that dream.

So they bought and opened a food cart, serving healthy sandwiches on rolled up pita bread. The cart was popular and lines grew longer everyday.

THIS was the magic moment. And Stacy and Mark didn’t even know it at the time.

Stacy and Mark decided to find a way to keep the customers waiting in line happy. So they baked the fresh pita bread into different flavored chips. The customers loved the chips and convinced Stacy and Mark to sell them in stores.

Stacy’s Pita Chip company was born.

By 2006, Stacy’s was generating about $60 million dollars a year in revenue and was sold to PepsiCo.

pitachips

We can all learn a lot from Stacy & Mark:
1) If there is a roadblock to your dreams, you can either jump over it, plow through it or change course.
2) Keep your customers happy. The million dollar business wasn’t in the pita sandwiches, it was in the simple chips they gave customers waiting in line.
3) Listen to your customers. They said the chips would sell in stores. They were right.
4) 100 true fans will get you 1,000. 1,000 true fans will get you a million.

The top 50 movie trailers ever

July 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

Movie Trailers

I’ll admit it. I love movie trailers. I love settling into my chair in a too-cold theater with a too-sticky floor and watching trailers for movies that won’t be out for months. Even if the trailers are often better than the movies themselves, I don’t mind.

Even at home, I like watching trailers on DVD. Those who know me will say that’s only because the trailers are the only part of the movie I’m guaranteed to stay awake through. Maybe it’s that, but I think I’m drawn to them because movie trailers are all about telling stories, the purest form of marketing. Unlike being interrupted by a billboard, commercial or magazine ad, the audience gave permission to watch the trailers. They’re not just captive, they’re interested.

With a tip of the microphone to the late, great Don LaFontaine and IFC.com, I’d like to point to you IFC’s great compilation from of the top 50 movie trailers of all time.

Link.

So fill up your popcorn, sit back, relax and enjoy. Two minutes at a time.

Get better at better (airlines)

July 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Burt_Drinking_36F

This is the first of a series of posts where I evaluate companies and industries who strive to serve their best customers better.

First stop, Gate 36C at O’Hare.

Are airlines doing better well? Could they be doing better better?

Very few companies execute better effectively. To truly treat their best customers better over the long term, the service has to meet three criteria:

1) Significant – The better service must be significantly better, not marginally better.

2) Consistent – The better service must be consistent. The best customers always get the better service. (NB: The ability to occasionally break policy in order to delight a customer is a power that every employee should have – it needs to be built into the company culture. Here, I’m not referring to occasional delights but how to treat long-term customers better.)

3) Transparent – The better service should be transparent. Both the best customers and the not as good customers should know what level of service they are getting and why.

All three are critical.

Let’s look at airlines. Almost every airline offers some sort of frequent flyer program with multiple tiers. Let’s evaluate:

Significant – The difference between sitting in first class versus coach is significant. The chairs are designed to comfortably hold human beings and you get free drinks. The food is significantly warmer, if not significantly better. Other perks like priority boarding and Crown Room access are also significant.

Transparent
Airlines make it obvious whether you can use certain services based on your status. From the big signs at the ticketing lines to the boarding priority announcement, to the little luggage tags denoting ‘diamond-encrusted platinum’ customers, it’s usually pretty obvious who has status and who doesn’t.

It is even most obvious (if ridiculous) when the flight attendants announce that those seated in coach may NOT use the first class cabin lavatory.

Consistent
This is where the airlines blow it. There are limited first class seats. Understood. So if you are Diamond, but so are 18 other people on that particular flight, you might end up sitting in 38F. This isn’t the end of the world, but here is where airlines screw up.

From the minute you step in the airport, Diamond is treated as Diamond. Faster ticketing lines. Better baggage policies. Crown room access.

But once you’re on the plane, if you don’t get one of the first class seats you effectively lose your status for the rest of the flight. They use the curtain, not the status, to determine how to treat you.

In coach, your Diamond status disappears. It doesn’t have to.

The airline knows your status and they know where you’re sitting. So why don’t they bring all Diamond members free noise-canceling headphones or two free drink coupons? It’s an easy (and cheap) way to say, “We know you didn’t get 1A this time, but we still value you as a premium customer.” It also tells a story to those passengers sitting nearby, “Get status, and you too will be treated better, regardless of where you sit.”

Marketing execs at any major airline will tell you this is too expensive and too complicated. They’re dead wrong.

In future posts, I’ll look at other companies and industries and how they can “get better at better.”

If you have an industry you would like me to profile, mention it in the comments or email me.

The Advertiser – Customer Break Up

July 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Thanks to Chris Brogan’s post for linking to this video.

For anyone who still thinks huge advertising budgets and interrupting customers is effective, these excellent videos put it all in context.

The second, longer video, including the “CEO” and the “Creative Director” is below…

breakup-large

100 marketing tips from Valeria

July 8, 2009 | 3 Comments

Valeria

Check out an excellent post by Valeria Maltoni over at her brilliant Conversation Agent blog. If you work in marketing (and you do), you need to read this.

From Valeria:

Stuff, especially marketing stuff, is due for a tune up. Let’s take the meaning challenge for marketing. Here are 100 thoughts:

The link to Valeria’s post is here.

A Goode lesson

July 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

After seeing the success of the “Best job in the world” contest run by the tourism board of Queensland, Australia, which drew almost 35,000 applications and put the obscure state on the map, David Ready, Jr., of Murphy Goode winery decided to run a similar contest.

Like the Queensland campaign, the publicly stated objective was to find someone to act as their social media marketer, blogging and tweeting about the product and the experience.

We at the Murphy-Goode Winery got to thinking about the new age of communications and we figured it was a pretty good thing. So to get going, we’re looking for someone (maybe you) who really knows how to use Web 2.0 and Facebook and blogs and social media and YouTube and all sorts of good stuff like that — to tell the world about our wines and the place where we live: the Sonoma County Wine Country.

In exchange, we’re offering you a “Really Goode Job” — a six-month job paying $10,000 a month plus accommodations!

We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.

Full overview of the contest is here.

The real objective, of course, was the same as the Queensland contest, lots of free publicity and brand exposure, which is fine when executed correctly.

Murphy Goode had participants submit videos and then had viewers vote and rate the videos. The videos were re-posted on YouTube. Over the next few weeks, as viewers were able to vote for their favorite contestants, it drove a lot of traffic to Murphy-Goode’s website.

But the devil is in the details. This is where Murphy Goode tripped up.

The votes meant nothing. When the top vote getter by a large margin San Francisco’s Martin Sargent wasn’t chosen to be in the top 100, he tweeted about it. Then it was picked up by Digg founder Kevin Rose, who retweeted it. It made it to Digg and was seen by a few million people. Murphy Goode eventually apologized for the confusion on Facebook.

murphy-goode-poster

But wait, before you pour out all your bottles of Snake Eyes…

Murphy Goode didn’t break any of their stated rules. The contest never claimed the votes determined the winners but they weren’t as clear as they should have been that the votes were ‘just for fun’. Since we live, for better or worse, in an American Idol world, many assumed that the votes determined who would make the next round.

The lesson here is pretty simple. Be 100% transparent (and do it in large type). If voting is involved, make sure that the results of the voting are clearly understood and not in the fine print.

Like a few companies have and many companies will, Murphy Goode learned a lesson about the finer points of social media. That said, the huge “backlash” is overstated and misdirected.

This wasn’t a case of intentional deception, it was a case of naive omission. Overall, the net result will be positive.

(full disclosure: I enjoy shaking dice, so it’s hard to hate any producer that makes wines named “Liar’s Dice” and “Snake Eyes” that admittedly doesn’t take themselves too seriously.)

I applaud Murphy Goode for jumping in the pool, even if they splashed a little on entry.

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