Blog buzz makes for free film advertising

WASHINGTON, May 31 (UPI) -- If you've seen any billboard ads or television commercials in the last month, you might be familiar with "Mission: Impossible 3" and "X-Men: The Last Stand." Both films used costly marketing strategies to raise public awareness.

However, the biggest buzz of this summer's movie season is for a small film with a miniscule advertising budget that happened to catch the attention of millions of Internet users.

Since the film was first mentioned in a blog post by screenwriter Josh Friedman last summer, "Snakes on a Plane" has found a free marketing agency in the form of fan-created online media.

"Up until recently, there was nothing at all from the studio," said Brian Finkelstein, creator of Snakes on a Blog, a fan site for the film.

Finkelstein said this film is a unique case in the movie industry.

"There's never been a movie marketed outside the studio's control to this degree," he said. "They had no anticipation of how people would react to it."

Even though nothing was known but the film's title and lead actor Samuel L. Jackson, "Snakes on a Plane" became a phenomenon on blogs and message boards across the Web.

The Internet has since been flooded with songs, posters, film trailers, graphics and even T-shirts related to the movie.

The fan response was so overwhelming that film studio New Line Cinema has decided to bring user-created media into the fold.

They are running a contest through music site TagWorld where users may submit songs related to the movie, and one winner chosen by the studio will be featured on the film's official soundtrack.

Additionally, New Line's official Web site for the film contains a page of links to unofficial fan sites.

Finkelstein said New Line deserves credit for letting the free publicity play out online without trying to push it any further.

"It's worked out very lucky for them," he said. "To their credit, though, they didn't get involved, they stayed out of the way, and they didn't sue anybody."

Finkelstein said he feels it would be hard to recreate this kind of unexpected fan buzz, because what made "Snakes on a Plane" first catch on was just the title.

"It's very up-front about what it's going to be," he said. "It's also such a goofy idea for a movie to begin with."

However, Finkelstein said, there is still much that movie studios can learn from "Snakes on a Plane."

"What they can do is encourage the audience to make content for itself related to the movie," he said. "All that's going to do is create more fan interest."

Peter Kim, senior analyst for Forrester Research, said studios are beginning to try to coax user-created media out of fans to create word-of-mouth buzz, especially with comedies.

For example, this year's "The Breakup" ran a contest where users submitted their worst break-up stories to a Web site to try and promote the film.

Kim said comedies can do things like this because they connect users to the film's theme without forcing the plot on the audience.

"It resonated with a certain demographic and audience," he said. "Would Brokeback Mountain have done well with that?"

Kim said another way of creating online buzz for a film is interactive games, which was an avenue both "Mission: Impossible 3" and "The Da Vinci Code" used in recent months.

"There's no way to make the movies themselves interactive," he said. "Getting users engaged, involved, into the emotional aspect of the content will get people talking to each other about it."

Kim said that the rise of blogs and message boards has been an unheralded boon for film marketing, because they create a means of mass communication to disseminate word-of-mouth buzz.

"Before the rise of online, it was hard work, people had to actually talk to each other" to spread the word, he said.

"Now, the game is obviously so different," Kim said. "Now you can get your message out and archive it."