Serendipity35

OK, I'm a film fan. Always have been. Even got a degree in it. Still, I would normally not pay much attention to a film like Stick It.

It's a teen flick described on Netflix as "When her rebellious attitude gets her in trouble with the law, acerbic 17-year-old Haley, a former gymnast, is sentenced to enroll in an elite gymnastics academy run by notorious coach, where she butts heads with a competitive rival. But with an important international meet on the horizon, can the girls put their differences aside to win?"

But it turns out they used MySpace to promote the film. That interests me.

This is the type of film that might make $6 million if it had a good opening weekend. It picked up $11 million last weekend. And some observers believe the difference was MySpace.

Here's the story. The studio, Disney's Touchstone Pictures, had promoted the film with only a few short (10- to 15-second) television spots, no outdoor marketing, minimal radio ads, and one ad in the LA Times. Not a big budget for promotion.

In January, an actress in the film, Vanessa Lengies, asked the director, Jessica Bendinger, whether it was OK to set up a MySpace page for the movie. Lengies did a page and Bendinger liked it enough to put up some of own money to hire a perosn to build up the site. That person did what MySpace users do - get friends, leave comments, send out birthday messages to friends and do anything that might appeal to their target audience.

Marketing MySpace style: they searched for new friends who were gymnasts, cheerleaders (who would know an earlier and similar film that Bendinger co-produced, Bring It On), fans of the band Fall Out Boy (featured in the film) They got 6000 friends attached to the site.

Then Disney took over the site in mid-April & added more professional features to coincide with more aggressive TV ads. The site http://www.myspace.com/stickitmovie looks pro compared to your typical MySpace site. As of today they had over 11,000 friends. Not enough people to get an $11 million dollar opening, but 11,000 teens with their own friends list of 100 or more is an impact. An impact that I don't think Hollywood has tapped before, but it knows that word-of-mouth can make/break a film and that personal recommendations (vs. critics' "official" reviews) are powerful promotion.

And what does this have to do with instructional technology?

What are your students doing online? How does a university reach potential students? (Is admissions still buying ads in newspapers that kids don't read?) How do we use these trends & technologies for learning?