The business of marketing movies is changing, and one of its traditional cornerstones is under assault.
I'm talking about tracking.
The old ways, many say, are dying. Holding focus groups is a notoriously under-representative affair, and handing around little cards or shoving a microphone in an audience member's face or as they come out of a test screening is way too confronting to foster honesty.
After several stories around town about how the tracking system was fundamentally broken;
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/08/business/la-fi-ct-movie-tracking-20131008
I decided to find out what was going on, and it led me to a finding that seems obvious in hindsight. The Internet is where we're our most honest and candid with our opinions, so it's the perfect place to go to generate tracking information.
As it turns out, several big names in technology are ahead of the curve, with Google and Adobe in particular mining social media and search data. Both companies claim it gives them an edge in predicting box office success, and I found out exactly how in this story;
