moviepilot labs

Why the Nerds should be Marching into Movie Marketing

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:54:00 +0100

There has been an avalanche of articles about the lessons marketers can learn from Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

There has never been a political digital campaign of such scale and scope, and the technology and data mining techniques applied by Obama’s team should be of special interest to Hollywood’s marketers. There are striking similarities between campaigning for the next box office hit and for the election of the next president of the United States.

by Tobi Bauckhage co-founder and CEO moviepilot.com

Let’s begin by observing some similarities:

First Weekend vs. Election Day

There is no other industry where the rules of market economy condense with such brutality and drama into one single moment of truth as film. Years of financing and development rounds, months of production, weeks in the cutting room, and then one opening box-office weekend that determines much of the success or failure for a several hundred million dollar investment.

The whole film industry is watching the first numbers coming in on Friday evening from the east coast, first exit polls analysis are evaluated and predictions for the weekend’s box-office results and overall success of a movie are made on Saturday.

The election-day experience is of noteworthy similarity. Years of campaign fundraising, months of campaigning, weeks of unremitting voters mobilization by campaign staff and then one moment of truth — election day. First, numbers from the east coast come in, exit polls, first predictions, calculations based on electoral college and popular vote numbers, all to measure the success of a campaign investment. The exact same experience.

Swing Audiences vs. Swing States

Over half of movie tickets are bought annually by only 10 percent of the population. Many of these frequent moviegoers decide on their movie choice very early, and some of them decide what they want the moment they see their options at the ticket booth (“Swing Audiences”).

Additionally, there are the people who normally do not go to the movie theater at all but when they do, make a significant impact on results (“Sluggish Moviegoers”).

All of these audience segments are important for the studios. And every movie marketer must achieve two goals to see success with these groups: to get them off the couch and into a theater seat for opening weekend, and to get that prospective audience to make the right choice at the ticket booth.

The same applies to presidential campaigns: The nominees and their staff must get people to make the correct, favorable choice and then mobilize them to actually leave their homes and fill out the ballot on election day.

Needless to say, there are major differences. While political campaigning is based on programs and hard facts that will directly affect the future life of voters, the only selling proposition in movie marketing is creativity and storytelling: to build a strong emotional connection with potential audiences based only on a narrative, casting, artwork and a trailer.

It is by far the most advanced industry in creating this magic connection with its audience. Data and technology will never change that.

But it might help to deliver the magic in a more impactful and efficient way. In this sense there might be a few interesting lessons to draw from this year’s Obama campaign:

Use Data to Develop a Holistic View

The biggest change in Obama’s ‘12 campaign was that his CTO, Harper Reed, and his staff integrated the existing databases from prior elections, polling, fundraising activities, field work and much more into one massive database. Only by doing this, was the data analytics team able to develop a holistic view on voting and non-voting America.

By cross-validating the patterns, they were able to draw conclusions from the insights the organization was getting across the United States. The profiles of people signing in to www.barackobama.com with Facebook Connect could be cross-referenced with the profiles of followers on Twitter and pre-registered voters, then further with the fund-raising supporter lists, and door-to-door surveys conducted across the US.

With this holistic view, it was possible to segment American citizens not only by location, ethnicity, household income and political interests but also by two scores that were calculated in the system: a score between 0-100 on how likely these segments were to vote for Obama, and a second identical scale gauging how likely these segments were to actually show up at the polls come election day.

The movie industry does not have this holistic data view yet; there is precious little data on moviegoer’s profiles per title. The awareness and intent of audiences to watch a specific movie are measured in small samples by age and gender, and even then only weeks before opening day.

Further, they do not cross-reference with the other angles and data insights the marketers are able to access, so they are difficult to validate in terms of ethniticity, location, household income, interest, etc. The studio’s tracking data do not cross-reference with their Facebook fan relationships, Twitter data, advertising click through rates, TV consumption patterns, home-entertainment purchase data, media affinities, and so on.

From a data standpoint, the movie industry is pretty much blind.

Test, Measure and Iterate

From the beginning, Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics were the goal, but political instincts might not be the means. With this approach, the Obama team transformed marketing into engineering. Political instincts were used as hypotheses that could be tested with real time data.

The process of campaigning became an iterative process with detailed feedback metrics, making investment and resource allocation decisions much more accountable.

While the movie industry has its tracking techniques that respond to big TV campaigns, this tracking data is rather coarse and un-detailed. And since it is mainly conducted via telephone landline calls, it is not monitoring some of the most important age groups and ethnicities that do make a difference at the box office.

If you only measure and monitor a small fraction of the market with a very rough methodology, it is very hard to allocate your marketing budgets effectively and efficiently.

You neither know who you activated through your advertising nor what was the approximate cost per activation.

While instincts and experience always will be important in the movie industry, a more data and structured signal-echo process would reduce a lot of wastage and lead to a higher marketing efficiency.

Concentrate on Scope, Not Only Scale

Once Obama’s team had modeled reliable probability scores within their big sample set, they could extrapolate the findings to a broader population and prioritize their target segment. Cross-referenced with latest polling numbers, Obama’s team could estimate which target segments of non-voters or undecided voters might actually make a difference in terms of winning the election in particular states, regions or even neighborhoods.

With this differentiated probability map the team could much more efficiently allocate their media budgets and campaign activities.

They could hone in in targeting those segments and driving up their probability scores with the most effect per spent campaign dollar or hour of volunteer work. To be fair, this is not at all a new approach, and on a macro level, Gov. Romney’s team did a similar job. They did not spend their media budgets on unwinnable states like California, where media budgets would have had a very low return on investment.

The key is, Obama’s team optimized this targeting technique on the street level, rather than simply the state level.

The movie industry does not have enough data to model its audiences by probability scores in a differentiated way. It concentrates parts of its campaigns to reach particular audience segments like “moms” or “gamers” where the strongest affinities are supposed. But this is done in a very undifferentiated way — and more importantly, it does not have any feedback process to ensure the effectiveness of these more targeted parts of the overall campaigns.

Start Early

With a thorough, data-centred approach that monitors the market in an elaborate way, marketing becomes a metric-driven feedback loop that can be used to hone in on the right positioning, and to deliver the most effective message to different market segments.

The key in this process is to begin early. Collect data as soon as possible, derive hypotheses from early population samples, test those hypotheses against broader populations, optimize, and verify the hypotheses. The value of early iterations of campaigning is not to win early votes but to gain data insights that can be used for the following campaign iterations.

Although the numbers were not accessible at this time, one would safely assume that Obama spent bigger portions of his budgets earlier than Romney, moving away from a “Total Awareness Buyout” Strategy one or two weeks before election towards a more engineering-typical approach of Agile Advertising.

The vast majority of the marketing budgets in the movie industry are spent within two weeks before the theatrical release. While that is understandable — and probably similar to Obama’s timing of spends, it means that by the time the big chunks are invested into TV advertising, the marketers do not yet have a clear picture of their most important audience segments and on the best technique to win them on opening weekend.

By spending a bit earlier movie studios would enter the metric-driven feedback loop earlier and could improve their market understanding. Every penny spent months before release would — in a data-driven approach — make every dollar spent closer to release more efficient and effective a thousand times over.

You can also follow me on Twitter here.

This article was first published at TheWrap.

Some great articles about Obama’s nerds and the influence of big data and tech on his campaign 2012.

One year older, one year wiser

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:15:00 +0100

We recently celebrated our one year birthday and we couldn’t be more pleased with how we’re rounding off our first year.

We’re happy to announce we just passed 10 million fans across our Facebook pages and we now have over 1,000 movies and TV shows on Moviepilot. Both huge milestones for us to end a great year on.

We’d like to thank you all for joining us on this journey. We have much more on the way, particularly in terms of empowering you to get even more involved on Moviepilot. In the mean time, get stuck in discovering a ton of upcoming movies and we will see you soon!

Onwards, Moviepilot

Don’t diss me!

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:11:00 +0100

In our last two posts we concentrated on proving that increasing PTAT has a direct effect on the organic reach of your Facebook page. In this and the next update, we want to analyze the second value that now has an effect on the Edgerank algorithm since the change in September 2012: negative feedback. In this post we will show that this value is relatively unlinked to organic reach. Next time we will show how you can improve your frequency by careful monitoring of negative feedback. In a third and last post on this, we will give our opinion on whether the usage of this value drives a better user experience.

by Jon Handschin
Co-Founder moviepilot.com

There has been a heated debate on how negative feedback affects Facebook pages performance since the algorithm update. A central piece was the article “Killing rumours with facts” by Techcrunch writer Josh Constine. Summarizing his position, he argues that the reduction in organic reach experienced by many pages in the last week of September is due to the roll out of the new negative feedback feature on the news stream rather than based on Facebook’s intent to push the promotion feature in an attempt to make page owners pay for additional reach. While Techcrunch’s article concentrates on the reason why the organic reach is decreasing, we instead want to understand which values are driving this change in order to gain insight on how page managers can improve their page’s performance.

First of all, let’s define Facebook’s term ‘negative feedback.’ Until now this value has not included the ubiquitous trolls that go ranting and raving in the comments of your posts; especially prevalent in the absence of a “dislike” option on Facebook. (Note that we strongly believe that a semantic analysis of comments will follow in the near future.)

Negative feedback instead summarizes the four negative actions a user can take when displayed with a page post. The user can: 1. Hide a story, indicating he or she is not interested in this particular post, 2. Hide all stories, indicating that he or she is not interested in any posts from your page anymore, 3. Report the story as offensive or as spam, thus alerting the Facebook security system, 4. Completely unlike your page,

These options have been made more accessible in the Facebook UX design. Here is a current screenshot:

Constantine argues that by making these negative options more accessible, more users express their dislike. With the help of Page Lever he composed the following chart. It aggregates the complaint ratio for more than 700 Facebook Pages across a period of several months. This data shows that the roll out of the more accessible negative feedback feature led to a large increase in negative feedback throughout September. This was subsequently matched by a decrease in organic reach in order to improve the user experience.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear indication for how the complaint ratio for this has been derived since Facebook offers you a variety of values. They provide unique complaints vs total number of complaints, as well as views, meaning impressions or reach. The TC article falls short, in our view, of determining the underlying ratio accurately.

Still, we believed that if their findings were true for so many other pages, we should be able to reproduce similar findings in our data, especially for those pages that were experiencing a decrease in organic reach throughout September. In order to analyze this, we aggregated the weekly organic reach from five of our comparable pages. All of them had between 100K-600K fans during September and October 2012. The chart represents the aggregated weekly organic reach across all of these five pages from September 1st until the middle of November.

It provides an accurate example of the drop we experienced when the update took place. It also shows that the change in our posting strategy, from posts aimed at driving traffic to posts aimed at engagement, was successful in regaining our organic reach. By increasing the PTAT values across pages from October 1st onwards, we were able to exceed the organic reach we had before the update.

We then calculated a daily complaint rate for all of these pages. We chose to define the complaint rate as the total amount of a page’s negative feedback divided by its daily organic impressions. The rationale behind this is that we are fairly certain that negative feedback is used as an indicator to Facebook if a page is posting too much, and thus influences the frequency of the distribution of the page’s posts. If the Techcrunch article was correct, we expected to find a similar increase in the daily complaint rate in September before the decrease in organic reach.

The below chart uses a double axis in order to represent the aggregated organic reach vs the aggregated daily complaint rate across our pages. But the curves do not resemble the Page Lever / Techcrunch chart. The complaint rate doesn’t peak extraordinarily high after the roll out of the new negative feedback feature in September. Rather, the value goes down simultaneously with the decrease in organic reach. Note that it also slowly rises again with the increasing organic reach. To us, it appears to be more of a dependent variable in this model rather than a driver.

We are not arguing that the Page Lever data is incorrect, we just haven’t been able to reproduce the same direct effect on our pages’ organic reach. Instead we have observed that organic reach is best driven by improving a page’s PTAT. Should you therefore forget about the complaints of your fans? Definitely not. They influence a value even more important than your organic reach, one that Facebook has recently hidden a little deeper in your Insights section — the weekly organic impressions of your page posts.

In our next post we will discuss how successfully monitoring the complaint rate increases your page’s frequency rather than its organic reach. So stay tuned and please leave (positive) feedback if you found this helpful.
You can also follow me on Twitter here.

The Story So Far

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:49:00 +0100

We founded Moviepilot with the goal of helping movie fans find great movies, and helping those great movies find their true audience. As filmmakers ourselves we understand the importance, and difficulty, in finding and engaging the right audience for a movie. As true cinema geeks, we also understand the influence fans have in helping a hidden gem turn into a surprise success.

The dedication it takes to stay ahead of the game as a movie buff is no easy feat. So, we created a platform that delivers all the movie information you are interested in from the upcoming movies you want to hear about, and gave it a beautiful home on the web. We believe that the magic of cinema can only unfold if a great movie meets its great audience. We’re here to help make that magic happen.

The Brutal Weekend of Truth

The first 48-hour period in which a film begins it’s journey at the box office often determines the future success of that movie. If it does well - awesome, it will run for weeks and weeks, travels the world and ultimately reach millions of people through DVDs and TV. If it doesn’t do so well - it’s toast. Kicked out of theaters and out of the system before it has even had the chance to be discovered. Years of work all decided in one weekend. That might seem a little harsh, but that’s how Hollywood works. There have been lots of great movies that never found their audience. And it has been getting more and more brutal over the last decade.

Fans to the Rescue

We can help solve this problem. With the help of great upcoming movies (there are hundreds) and awesome dedicated movie fans (we have hundreds of thousands), we can fix this. The answer for us is simple - understanding you. Within our movie community we’re collecting rare insight into what the most avid movie fans out there are interested in. We study movie tastes and watch the movements of word of mouth recommendations. We collect this information and help movie studios and independents better understand and reach their audiences. Your voice is very important to us, and together, we can shake things up.

Power to the People

Fans are just as important as the movies themselves when it comes to making cinema magic. Moviepilot.com is growing into a platform where fans can raise their own voices and be heard by millions. A place where they come to learn and follow everything about the movies they care about. A home where they can get in contact with filmmakers, influence their decisions, and support them in finding their right audience. We’re building Moviepilot for fans to get behind the movies they love, and for filmmakers to acknowledge their fans as a part of the cinema magic and give back to them.

Less than a year ago we launched moviepilot.com, and with 8 million Facebook fans and hundreds of thousand of users later, we’re well on our way to creating the world’s leading, and most influential, movie community. We love what we do, and we couldn’t be more excited about where Moviepilot is headed.

Just in: TV Shows

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:33:00 +0100

Greetings, friends!

We recently crossed the thousand movie mark, meaning that we now have over a thousand movies waiting to be discovered and followed on Moviepilot. As we continue to grow towards our goal of being the world’s best movie community, today we are excited to announce we have a new area of discovery to be explored: TV Shows!

One hundred of the top TV shows currently airing (or soon to air) have been added to our Explore pages, allowing you to follow shows and be kept up to date with news, set pictures and exclusives as they drop.

Shows like The Walking Dead and American Dad are welcome additions to our fast growing database of awesomeness. We’re excited to see which shows you’re most interested in and to deliver sweet, sweet content right to your hungry eyes.

Tweet us or email us if you have thoughts, feedback or questions! We hope you like it.

KEEP TALKING!

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:22:00 +0100

This is our second post in our Facecook Insights Disclosed Blog. We share ideas, insights and thoughts derived from running 13 pages around movie topics on Facebook with over 10M likes. Last time we analysed whether or not an increased impact of PTAT (People Talking About That) really led to a better user experience. We formulated some doubts, at least from certain perspectives such as those published here. Today we will take a closer look at the interaction between the PTAT value and Organic Reach.

by Jon Handschin
Moviepilot Co-Founder

Facebook wants us to understand the importance of PTAT and Organic Reach. PTAT again being the amount of times in a 7 day period somebody comments on one of your page posts, shares or likes them, thus creating a story about you in the respective user’s newsfeed. Whereas organic reach is the amount of individuals from your fans that actually see at least one of your page posts within a 7 day period. In contrast to organic impressions, in organic reach each fan your posts get displayed to will only count once a week, even if more of your stories are being shown to that fan. You can tell how much Facebook stresses the importance of these two values at first glance in your Insights section. PTAT and Reach are the first and foremost curves displayed to you there. The central question for you as page manager should be: “Can I drive the organic reach of my page by increasing PTAT? And if so, what effect do I expect?” In this blog entry we come up with some answers to these questions.

The overview section of Facebook Insights concentrates on your Reach and Talking About it values.

In order to make the performance across our pages accessible, we transformed these values into ratios to likes. This makes it possible to compare our larger pages like moviepilot.com with over 4M fans to smaller pages like Romantic Movies with just 100K Fans. At the beginning of October, shortly after the Edgerank Algorithm update, we plotted these ratios, the PTAT/Likes against Org. Reach/Likes for all of our pages. It showed the following distribution. Note that all values are for the US American market, since PTAT to Organic Reach dependencies vary strongly among different geo-markets.

Fig. 1: PTAT/Like vs Org. Reach/Like Distribution among the moviepilot theme channels in the beginning of October 2012
The x-axis represents PTAT/Likes the y-axis is Org. Reach/Likes

With the usual one or two exceptions you can pretty much see a linear dependency between both values. Now we will apply some math we haven’t used since high school. (Don’t worry - it won’t hurt). Eliminating the extremes, we inserted a trend line and conducted a regression analysis. We came up with the equation:

Org. Reach/Likes=23%+1.71*PTAT/Likes

Fig. 2: Trendline in the PTAT/Like vs Org. Reach/Like Distribution among the moviepilot theme channels in the beginning of October 2012 The x-axis represents PTAT/Likes the Y-axis is Org Reach/Likes

In other words: we could verify the positive impact of higher PTAT/Likes ratios on Org. Reach/Likes. We estimated that for every additional % in PTAT/Likes our pages should be rewarded with approximately 1.71% Org. Reach/Likes.

Throughout November we concentrated more on PTAT, driving stories that focused on call-to-actions such as commenting, liking and sharing our page posts rather than clicking an external link. In this time we nearly tripled our average PTAT/Likes value across all 13 pages.

Fig. 3: Increases in PTAT/Like ratios from October 2012 to November 2012 across 13 moviepilot pages Secondly, we had to assess that our increase in PTAT/like ratios had actually been rewarded with increased Org. Reach/Like ratios.

Fig. 4: Increases in Org. Reach/Like ratios from October 2012 to November 2012 across 13 moviepilot pages

Figure 4 illustrates that the assumption is actually true: If you concentrate on he PTAT values of your pages this will be directly rewarded with increased Organic Reach values. But we also wanted to estimate if our initial assumption had been right that we could even preict the amount of increase in organic reach. At the beginning of November we therefore plotted all PTAT/Likes and Org. Reach/Likes ratios for our pages again and inserted a new trend line.

Fig. 5: Trendline in the PTAT/Like vs Org. Reach/Like Distribution among the moviepilot theme channels in the beginning of November 2012
The x-axis represents PTAT/Likes the Y-axis is Org Reach/Likes

Again you can easily insert a trend line and conduct a new regression analysis for the data gathered at the beginning of November.

Org. Reach/Likes=39%+0.31*PTAT/Likes

This analysis comes up with smaller values than in October: the trendline has become less steep. This means that each additional percent in PTAT/Likes is “only” rewarded with about 0.3% in Org. Reach/Likes in contrast to the 1.71% we had anticipated a month ago.

As a result one can summarize: Yes, you can increase the organic reach of your page by increasing your PTAT values. This correlation is nearly linear. But while increasing your PTAT values you will find diminishing returns on investment. Especially as the page manager of a publishing service that has to balance between PTAT and traffic stories linking to your external site, you should know about the saturation point of your page. You will be able to optimize the traffic to your external site AND the organic reach of your Facebook page by balancing out PTAT vs traffic driving page posts.

Hope this was helpful.
Leave a comment in either case.

Next time we will take a closer look at the second value that has increased impact on your Edge Rank: the negative feedback from your fans.

November news

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 17:52:00 +0100

Hello Pilots,

November brings with it some new features that we’re rather proud to show you. First off – Profiles. Your Moviepilot Profile features all the movies you follow and gives you your very own home on Moviepilot. To register your username (and thus, your profile URL) head to moviepilot.com/settings. Friends, fellow pilots and curious onlookers can check out your profile at moviepilot.com/USERNAME. We’d love to hear what you think, so please do let us know.

If you haven’t yet followed many movies, you will notice your profile is rather bare! Don’t leave it that way though, go ahead and Explore over 900 upcoming movies and follow the projects that interest you. All the corresponding news on those movies will appear in your feed on your home page.

You can also now find your Facebook friends on Moviepilot, and invite those who haven’t yet made it here. Click on the downwards arrow in the top right hand corner and select ‘Friends’ from the pop-up menu. At the bottom of your list of friends, you can choose to invite friends from Facebook. Don’t be shy – the more the merrier.

That’s all from us for now. We hope you like the changes. As usual, do let us know if you have feedback via Twitter or email. Until next time, we’ll see you around Moviepilot.

Facebook Insights Confidentials

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:24:19 +0100

Hello Facebook Mavens, Social Media Marketeers, Friends.

We here at Moviepilot are strong believers in the Facebook platform. Currently, we operate 12 pages celebrating upcoming movies from Superheroes to Horror; Fantasy to Legendary Directors and through them we are connected with 9 million Likes in the U.S. today.

We are thankful for the opportunities that Facebook has given us during the past few years. There would not be a U.S. version of Moviepilot if it hadn’t been for the simultaneously influential and disruptive impact Facebook has had on the web overall.

But we also feel that there is so much more potential out there for case studies and business scenarios, if only so that the knowledge about content strategies and their effects on KPIs on Facebook is more readily available to a wider audience.

This is why we want to disclose our insights and the lessons we’ve gained from our daily work on Planet Facebook with you.

We hope you enjoy and we’re thankful for every note of encouragement or criticism you throw our way.

All the best,

Jon Handschin
Co-Founder

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGING

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 22:06:00 +0100

Changed Edge Rank I: Why “Talking About” is not “Engagement” and why this ultimately leads to a deteriorated user experience

We have wanted to publish information on our Facebook insights for quite some time now. But the changes made to the Facebook Edge Rank algorithm in the past two weeks have also altered everything we wanted to talk about. So in this note and in the consecutive ones we will only concentrate on the affected changes and what page owners can do to anticipate them.

The Edge Rank Algorithm determines which story makes it into your personal news feed. You may recall that your feed is not sorted chronologically by default but according to relevancy. When this was introduced a couple of years ago there was an uproar in the community, but pretty quickly everybody seemed to appreciate that Facebook was fishing out those cat pictures from old high school classmates you hadn’t talked to in years and instead highlighting stories from people closer to your daily life.

The Edgerank algorithm is what determines this relevancy. And it takes into account a variety of factors that are accessible to all page owners via Facebook Insights. Facebook has done a really great job of offering you all data relevant to your pages’ performance. You can even download this data as a CVS file for any given period of time. (Obviously, you don’t get the whole recipe though, neither how important which KPI is for you overall relevance nor 100% of all ingredients used in the Edgerank agorithm. But it’s still much more than Coca Cola would ever do.)

The latest update in the Edgerank algorithm has again stirred quiet a lot of negative reactions especially among Brand Page owners who have reported a significant loss in Organic Reach and Viral Distribution of their page posts. You can find a good analysis of the algorithm update by Edgerank Checker here.

When speaking about the new factors that influence the updated Edgerank algorithm Facebook claims that two factors have increased their impact in the update: The first is the “Talking About” value also referred to as PTAT (People Talking About This). The PTAT rises when people like or comment on your story thus reproducing a story “about you” in their stream. (The second aspect is “negative feedback,” which we will address in our next posts.) Facebook has also informed us that the algorithm is designed to promote content with high “engagement” from the user perspective, but what they are actually referring to is the PTAT.

In order to understand why both terms are not the same, one has to know that “Engagement” is also a term from the Facebook Insights section. But in comparison to the PTAT value it takes into account a much wider set of actions a user can take while interacting with content. For example, Engagement also includes clicks to open a picture to its full size and clicks on referral links provided in your page posts.

Referral links affect publishers, like Moviepilot, especially in comparison to pure advertisement brand pages, who are more concerned with exposure than with website traffic. A publisher’s goal is to write intriguing page posts that catch the readers’ attention and make him want to know more about the content. The brand page manager, on the other hand, wants to get across his commercial message. His goal for the post is not to leave the Facebook canvas.

Let’s look at an example how different page post compositions reflect these opposite goals: An entertainment editorial piece could be based around an A-List star’s birthday (Clooney, Pitt, Depp). The publishers interest is to generate readers for the article written in order to celebrate the star. So after the jump the reader might find interesting and fun facts about the past career or future plans of the star.

From an Edgerank perspective this is not optimal. Alternatively, the page manager could simply wish the star a great birthday without an external link and invite fans to do the same by liking the story. (Everybody remembers Steve Krug, right?)

Since this alternative does not offer a jump to more content about the star, the call to action is streamlined and likes and comments rise. The updated algorithm enhances this composition, despite the fact that the first composition might offer more engagement because the clicks on the external link are counted as well. Comparing both compositions from a user perspective, we argue that the page post that offers more in depth information and content about the actor offers the better user experience.

So the added value of PTAT ultimately encourages posts to be composed of rather simplistic content with easy like and commenting call to actions. This is mostly done with sweet and/or funny pictures and video content. A true optimization from the user perspective should have enhanced the “Engagement” value rather than the PTAT, thus also promoting more challenging, in depth content and higher quality editorials just as much as extremely witty viral posts. To sum up, one can say that Facebook is currently putting more effort to keep you within the Facebook canvas than to let you go somewhere else. A fact that does not correlate too well with the mission statement of “connecting the world” and a general growing understanding that Facebook is more than just the blue canvas, but the entry door to thousands of awesome apps. The apps lose. The canvas wins.

Please leave your comments and remarks.

Next time we will publish an overview how directly PTAT affects the Organic Reach of your Page.

The Rise Of Superheroes At Cinemas

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 17:06:00 +0200

Ever since the release of _Spider-Man_ in 2002, superhero movies have been feverishly churned out and dominated the box office. The majority of superhero movies are released for the summer blockbuster season and attract huge numbers at the cinemas.

The biggest box office draws have come from America’s largest comic book publishers, Marvel and DC Comics. Marvel has brought us Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America and The Hulk, among others. DC Comics has given us the likes of Batman, Superman and the Green Lantern.

2012 has truly been the year of the blockbuster superhero movie. The release of The Avengers earlier this year has broken all sorts of box office records. It now holds the US record for the biggest opening weekend of all time, grossing over $207 million. The next biggest opening weekend for a superhero movie is The Dark Knight Rises, also released this year, with a gross of over $160 million.

Such is the popularity of The Avengers that it has grossed almost $610 million in the US after adjusting for inflation, putting it in the top 30 grossing movies of all time in the US. The Dark Knight follows closely behind, grossing $595 million.

So what is it about the superhero genre that has made it so popular among moviegoers?

Superhero movies attract two generations of audiences

Most superhero movies are adapted from comic books published by major companies such as Marvel and DC Comics. The films are normally action-packed special effects spectacles that appeal predominantly to 18-25 year old males, while comic book fans who have been collecting these comics throughout the decades are also eagerly anticipating a film version of their favorite superheroes. This widens the potential audience and therefore the box office profits.

Adaptations come with an already established fan base

Movie distributors are generally more willing to take a chance with a story from an established source, such as a comic book, rather than original scripts. Since you already have an established fan base with the die-hard comic book fans, the movie will already be on the road to box office success.

Superhero movies are a form of escapism

Many moviegoers go to the cinemas to watch movies as a form of escapism. With relatively recent major events including the September 11 attacks, the war in Iraq and the global financial crisis, people have looked to popcorn films like superhero movies to escape, if only for a couple of hours, these depressing issues.

Superhero movies have developed into franchises

The initial success of films like Spider-Man and Batman Begins has spawned several sequels and become franchised. Although Batman Begins was a very financially successful movie, its sequel, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises have surpassed the box office takings of the first film, and combined with the Batman films of the 1980s and 1990s, have made almost $2.6 billion at the US box office. The first Spider-Man and its two sequels have also been consistently high-grossing, combining to make almost $1.7 billion.

The verdict

The movie-going public continue to flock to superhero movies, and their continuing popularity can also be judged by how they are rated by the public. Of the two major superhero movies released in 2012, The Avengers has a rating of 8.5 out of 10 from IMDB users, and The Dark Knight Rises has a rating of 8.9 out of 10. This places them both well within the IMDB Top 250 movies list.

Since the year 2000, films made by DC Comics have bought in a box office revenue of just over $2 billion, while Marvel films have bought in $5.7 billion in the U.S. With plenty more films and sequels on the way, it looks like the superhero movie genre is here to stay.

Discover your next favorite movie

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:12:00 +0200

Our community on Moviepilot loves to discover. Not only is it fun, but it allows them to find exciting new movies. Two months ago, we released a new discovery bar to improve the Moviepilot experience in two key areas: access and navigation. We’d like to invite you backstage, and let you in on how things are working out. Hint: We’re quite happy.

Here at Moviepilot Labs, we work tirelessly to see you find that “next perfect movie”. Incremental improvements is our day to day MO, but sometimes big leaps are are needed to get greater results. In this case, our team decided to start from scratch and rethink a whole new approach to discovering movies. Let’s break it down:

The way to discovery: Simple, fast access

We want you to be able to discover all our content with ease and without distraction, so we moved away from the more traditional ‘click’ towards a solution birthed from mobile and tablet experiences: the swipe. Accessing our discovery bar couldn’t be
any easier—simply swipe or scroll upwards and the bar appears, ready for you to explore. Not only it is easy, but it also looks really slick! See for yourself.

Directing you towards great movies, with swift navigation

Moviepilot has more than 25 genre channels with over 500 movies in total. Allowing our community easy access to all these movies while keeping it enjoyable was our target. Mission complete! You can now swiftly navigate and discover new channels by scrolling left and right, or using the arrows at each end. We’ve made it super-simple to easily find your favorite genre by associating each with a iconic still from a classic of the genre.

Our community loves it, but this is only the beginning

We’re really pleased to see our new discovery bar allow more and more people to find great new movies every day. We’ve seen a 280% growth in access to the discovery bar, and a increase of 900% in users selecting genres.

This is still only the beginning. We are working tirelessly every day to improve Moviepilot and make it an amazing experience for you. As always, we’re keen to hear your feedback, so do drop us a comment and tell us how you’re finding the discovery bar, or just your thoughts on Moviepilot in general. Thanks!

Over and out,
The Moviepilot Labs Team (Javier)

Moviepilot Talks Social Media At International Media Convention, Berlin

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 16:09:00 +0200

Jon Handschin, CPO and co-founder of Moviepilot, was invited to join the International Media Convention as part of IFA 2012 in Berlin, Germany. The event was held on Tuesday and addressed the issue of ‘smart cinema’ and how social media is changing the film industry. Jon was part of a panel discussion that included renowned industry professionals, including Marco Kreuzpaintner (Director, Founder and CCO of Summerstorm Entertainment); Kasten Aurich (Managing Director at Sabotage Films) and Oliver Damian (Producer/Managing Director at 27 Films Productions).

Promoting a film now involves more than just a great movie poster and positive reviews in magazines or newspapers. However, the success of a film doesn’t just stop with the number of tweets or likes, either. When it comes to reaching out to a film-savvy crowd, it’s a combination of content and engagement. In a digitally competitive environment, it’s also important to offer a platform where fans can share and connect, whether that’s offline or on.

In the upcoming years, we’re expecting the film industry to utilize social media even more, and create interactive and engaging campaigns that specifically target the audience. What are your thoughts? How do you think social media will change the way movies are marketed?

Hollywood, Celebrities & Red Carpets: Moviepilot Opens Office in L.A.

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:47:00 +0200

We’ve reached over 6 million fans in the US, so it’s about time that we have more of a presence there. We’re excited to announce that this month we’ve opened our first office in the Stateside! Situated in the heart of Los Angeles, we’re that much closer to where all the movie action and magic happens.

The daily operations happening in our LA office will further develop our relations with major studios, including Paramount, Fox, and Universal. We not only want to bring the latest film news and celebrity buzz to our fans, but we also want movie buffs to have an input on upcoming films that they really care about. Our ultimate goal is to have our fans help cast actors for an Iron Man sequel, or decide which film Ridley Scott should direct next.

Moviepilot has come a long way since our humble beginnings in Berlin, and we couldn’t have done it without our loyal fans and followers! We’ll have photos up from our new LA office soon, so watch this space.

For more information about the move and where we envision ourselves to be in the future, read up on Tobi Bauckhage’s (CEO and founder of Moviepilot) recent interview with Screen Daily.

Team Moviepilot Labs uniform for Tuesday!

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:00:25 +0200

Team Moviepilot Labs uniform for Tuesday!

Find more movies, actors and directors with our search bar!

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:26:43 +0200

Got to find a particular film? Want to know which upcoming movies your favorite star will be in? The search-bar has made a return, new and improved, and ready bring the latest movies to you!

Check it out and get the most out of the hundreds of upcoming movies we have on moviepilot.com.

Moviepilot Labs is all about getting involved with the computing...

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 14:14:00 +0200

Delicious ruby cake!

Pre-workshop breakfast...

@gigglegirl4e giving an intro talk

Tote bags with 'Hackers' quotes!

Working with RoR basics...

Moviepilot Labs is all about getting involved with the computing community, and this weekend we were psyched to help out with the July workshop for Rails Bridge supported by Rails Girls Berlin at co.up Coworkingspace.

Rails Girls is a group committed to making computing skill-building and Ruby on Rails (RoR) more accessible to the growing numbers of women breaking into the field right now. This month’s workshop featured over 90 attendees, organizers and coaches and included introductory talks on programming with RoR and working on making and extending applications.

We even got to bring some tote bags with quotes from the movie Hackers on them, designed by @Hagenburger and @cuchicosta!

Special thanks to Rails Girls Berlin, Rails Bridge, co.up Coworkingspace; photos courtesy of Renee De Voursney, Claudia Lindner, @NerdBabe and our own @anomiseditrix; and all the Rails Girls Berlin organizers, coaches, sponsors and attendees!

Found Photo: Moviepilot Labs’s own @omdb at the Berlin...

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 10:50:01 +0200

Found Photo: Moviepilot Labs’s own @omdb at the Berlin Hack and Tell #8 in/hackable

Photo by Sebastian Glowinski for Berlin Hack and Tell

Moviepilot just celebrated its 5th birthday, and to celebrate we...

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 14:48:00 +0200

Moviepilot just celebrated its 5th birthday, and to celebrate we had an epic summer bash/family reunion at Roadrunner’s Rock and Motor Club! BBQ, friendly drinks, tunes and most of all, our extended Moviepilot family getting together to let the good times roll.

Thanks to Claudia & Co for planning, @nuc for the photos, and most of all the Moviepilots out there who came to party with us!

Moviepilot Labs hits the June 2012 Berlin Tech Meetup

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 12:00:00 +0200

Moviepilot Labs’s own @letimedium presented at the June 2012 Berlin Tech Meetup, sharing Chaplin, our graph database and all the fun stuff we’ve got going on! Thanks to all who attended!

Other presenters included: Shapeways Loopcam WhenAUser Ezeep Squadmail

Check out the Berlin Tech Meetup group here.

Get a peek inside Moviepilot Labs

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 17:07:00 +0200

Ever wonder what Moviepilot Labs, the headquarters for Moviepilot, is like? Sure you might be seeing some glimpses here and there, but what’s it really got going? We know we don’t have the most conventional-looking offices around, and frankly, we think they suit our unique, laid-back vibe. And what makes our Moviepilot Labs team really love this place? In a word: Style.

Styleupyouroffice.com recently stopped by to check out the lay of our labs, so to speak. They chatted with @tbauckhage, @Hagenburger and @anomiseditrix about why a good office design is important and why we think Moviepilot Labs has it.

Check out the full story here. Special thanks to Rochus (@rrho) for photos; and Tobi, Nico, Jen and the rest of the Moviepilot Labs people who were featured in the spread.