Feedback please! mySpace, Screener DVD: Flatland The Movie

Ladd

Ladd

Hey Everyone -

As many may know from another thread, which I can now not find, I've been dabbling in a mySpace marketing campaign for my animated feature film "Flatland." The plan was to make a profile for the movie, and each of the characters in the film. The characters would respond "in character" in a cute way, leaving comments and sending messages as if they actually existed - in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

After about a week of modest effort, I have managed to gather roughly 10,000 unique "friends" for all the characters and the movie. The campaign consisted of myself and my crew (er, wifey) sending out friend requests to people we thought likely to have read the book that the movie is based on, or would be intrigued by the movie's concept. We sent out about 200-300 friend requests per day. Several characters have broken the 1000 mark.

I gave the campaign a rest for a day and still am getting about 1 or 2 friend requests per hour, per character. Some of this is spammed friends, but a lot arenot, based upon some of the comments and messages that the characters get. "Loved the book!" "When's the movie coming out?"

So my plan is this.

1) Take a month (or two or three) to wrap the film up.
2) Have the crew (er, wifey) continue the campaign in earnest while I do so.
3) Sell a "pre-distribution collector's item screener DVD" of the movie to people online, announcing it to the friends when it's available.

I plan on burning the DVD's myself, using printable DVD's (for a nice professional look), etc. Costs for me would be about $2 a DVD. Would plan on selling it for, say, $10.00.

One thing I am wondering about - is there a good company I can use to get a decent shopping cart system to sell the DVD, that will take credit cards, paypal, etc., so I don't have to mess with that end of it?

Thanks! Feedback and holes in the plan would be much appreciated.
 
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this might work. i'm about to try some comment posting for my teaser for The Rapture soon, and see how much this would generate the 'noise' factor for me where they would spread it to their friends or their friends will 'check it out' or it gets deleted. :) hehe
 
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There is always EBAY lol. You can pay in every format there. Just have people linked to your auction. Make sure you put the quanity at like a 100 so you dont have to keep remaking lots. Good luck, Semper Fi
 
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Let me know when it is up LADD so I can go ahead and buy it. I would honestly prefer ebay. I buy alot of crap off there. Mainly because most people dont mind sending to an FPO AP and shit like that. Get to work. I dont know how you do it while serving?
 
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Well, I don't know if EBay is the right choice - I'm selling to individuals. I'd like the shopping cart functions to blend seamlessly with a website I'd build for the movie...
 
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Ladd, I know paypal takes credit cards, that's how I sold about 100 copies of A Jokers Card myself. people used paypal to pay for it. One thing that I do not like about paypal is 'it forces' you to create an account thought.

I am about to help a friend create a shopping card for his gallery so we thought of using Paypal for this as well.
 
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Yeah, I want to avoid asking potential customers to make a paypal account. I'd rather it act like a regular shopping cart from a larger company - like a Land's End or something like that.
 
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Actually, Paypal does NOT require the payer to have a paypal account.

Where are you hosting your site at Ladd? Does the host have a shopping cart system? You can't accept credit cards on your own site unless you have a merchant account or piggyback off of someone else's account. It might not be cost effective to get a merchant account. Plus, you'll need SSL certificates and the like to ensure customer data is not compromised on your site.
 
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We sold our DVD through a custom shopping cart at one time and it cost a fortune (fees, hosting, etc etc). Switched the whole thing over to PayPal and it's been great. Check it out (and buy 500 of them):

www.cayugalakewinecountry.com

With our narrative, we are in the beginning stages of setting up a CustomFlix account to sell the DVD through them. GREAT customer service and it gets your title listed on Amazon (if it's bought through Amazon you take a huge hit). What I REALLY like about CustomFlix is NO inventory. They take care of ALL that. I have a storage room stacked with 4,000 DVDs of the wine trail documentary that have to be sold, packaged, posted and mailed one at a time. It's an endless pile.

With CustomFlix, I have zero.
 
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No, I'm just saying that PayPal does not require payers to have a paypal account. They changed that requirement about two years ago.

I was referring to your website host having a shopping cart. Most of them have one already installed.
 
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Coot, thanks for the clearification, this what I noticed when using paypal, it asked for an email and a 'password' later on 3rd page.. then when you order again, you are asked to do the same and it automatically opens 'the account' page, and if you don't want to use the same info, you have to add an account again, so for me, that's almost like creating a new account in a sublte way. Anyway, I did this like last year...

Don't you have to subscribe to a credit merchant to use the shopping cart feature?
 
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Alphie said:
With our narrative, we are in the beginning stages of setting up a CustomFlix account to sell the DVD through them. GREAT customer service and it gets your title listed on Amazon (if it's bought through Amazon you take a huge hit). What I REALLY like about CustomFlix is NO inventory. They take care of ALL that. I have a storage room stacked with 4,000 DVDs of the wine trail documentary that have to be sold, packaged, posted and mailed one at a time. It's an endless pile.

With CustomFlix, I have zero.
Click to expand...

Interesting - although the costs seem to be fairly high on small quantities. Not counting time, I can generate a DVD for around $2 a piece while drinking coffee, eating a bagel, and sitting there in my boxers. Their costs, on the other hand, are $7.95 for 1-19 orders. Of course they are providing a box and slip inserts for the DVD's, I was planning on something simpler - like a netflix type of thing, DVD in a little mailing envelope and that's about it...

Would be interesting, though, if I got 500 orders and shipped it through them.
 
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CootDog said:
No, I'm just saying that PayPal does not require payers to have a paypal account. They changed that requirement about two years ago.

I was referring to your website host having a shopping cart. Most of them have one already installed.
Click to expand...

I'm using yahoo at the moment. I'm pretty happy with their service, but they want extra $$ for a shopping cart system. I'm tending to think the PayPal system is the way to go.
 
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Custom Flix Option

Ladd said:
Interesting - although the costs seem to be fairly high on small quantities. Not counting time, I can generate a DVD for around $2 a piece while drinking coffee, eating a bagel, and sitting there in my boxers. Their costs, on the other hand, are $7.95 for 1-19 orders. Of course they are providing a box and slip inserts for the DVD's, I was planning on something simpler - like a netflix type of thing, DVD in a little mailing envelope and that's about it...

Would be interesting, though, if I got 500 orders and shipped it through them.
Click to expand...

I guess if you're making between $7-9 per unit, I'd rather opt for less money to NOT have to think about it. They also handle all returns (in case the DVD doesn't work). I have sent them our master, a CD with the sleeve art and face art and they will send me a proof of the product. Once I approve it, the store is "set up" and we begin promoting it. The other nice thing, is it puts you in their online catalog and you can have your trailer on their site.

Man ... you'd think I WORKED for them or something!
 
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Customflix

I'm a huge believer in customflix...no overhead, no shipping, no headaches. Personally, I wouldn't print them off myself, but thats possible I guess. Best wishes either way, I think you'll find that the profits are similar either way, but going with a place like customflix is virtually no work except marketing....which is a lot easier and worth it in my opinion while you make your first run and then shop for a distributor.
 
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Report: mySpace Marketing

I can't seem to find my old post on my mySpace experiments but I'm here to report back.

Synopsis: 1) I am sorely dissapointed in the mySpace phenomenon and 2) I'd like other suggestions on internet marketing a small indie film that anyone might have.

The Long Form:
Because I have been doing an animated feature film that required a lot of waiting around for computers, I had time to make a lot of friend requests and gather up lots of friends. I had several accounts, one for myself, and one for each of the main characters in my film - you can get the idea here: http://www.myspace.com/flatlandthemovie

All in all I gathered well over 50,000 friends between the different accounts.

I have so far had a disapointing return on purchases. I don't think this is because the marketing content was bad, per se. I think it has to do with the nature of mySpace. Would I buy anything from a fellow mySpace user? The answer is no. So why would anyone buy my stuff without significant "branding" having occured ih other media? I believe that mySpace is only good for branding / reinforcement marketing purposes, but not for targeted sales. There's simply too much garbage to overcome, between the porn bots, the half-clothed Asian club goers, the dj's, and the generally mentally deficient.

I investigated the costs of advertising on mySpace. A crummy banner ad was quoted to me at around $3000.00 as an experimental toe-dip, which would have gotten me a small number of user impressions. It would be interesting to see if I could get them to consider an experiment - perhaps earning money on each DVD sold in exchange for decent advertising as a "featured profile" or some such. It strikes me that mySpace is struggling to figure out how to make money on their system and advertising revenue is not really cutting it. To my mind, they need to go the old "Ronco" route - the system that lets television stations run late night commercials with "special phone numbers." The TV station and the manufacturer of the product do revenue sharing. MySpace could do the same thing. Technology wise they'd easily be able to audit the number of sales they make.

Unfortunately their sales department seems to be stuck in the box in regards to innovations. Ad execs make commissions and outside of the box can mess around with those commissions.

Other problems:
1) Restrictive: I also believe that mySpace is far too restrictive in certain aspects in regards to user interface.
2) You can easily lose track of people that you'd like to keep track of.
3) Messages are deleted after 14 days.
4) It's impossible to know if if you've already sent someone a friend request or not, and you can easily offend people if you're not careful.
5) You can easily get tagged for spamming or have your account semi-disabled, in which you can receive friend requests and messages, but can not respond. This means making a new account to respond to people, then getting tagged, then making another new account, and so on.
6) The number of users that mySpace really has is HIGHLY overreported. If their advertising sales numbers that they give were ever audited like the newspaper industry's I have no doubt they'd flunk it big time.
7) Unless you want to spend hours and hours on how to "trick out" your mySpace profile, it's very difficult to make a profile that looks any good.
8) Posting videos and trailers on the mySpace site are a waste of time. Certainly you'll get people to look at it, but you'll get nothing for it. The "top videos" on mySpace are primarily Rupert Murdoch / Fox productions. They believe in synergy. No point in promoting the little guy's film, those are always shoved to the back no matter how many views they get in a day or not.

So in the final analysis, unless mySpace considers working out deals with indie filmmakers to do revenue sharing, I consider mySpace marketing a lost cause.

So if anyone has any suggestions on other cheap and effective internet marketing I'd love to hear it. Hope I've been of help to anyone considering such a venture. Thanks!
 
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This generally supports my thoughts on the site as a useful business tool as well...too much clutter. Thanks for doing the research for us :) I still think it's a good site for keeping track of friends and rediscovering ones you've lost track of...other than that, not much going on there.
 
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