Cloverfield: A Monster Marketing Success

January is notorious for being a horrible month for new films. 'Cloverfield', Paramount's Manhattan-based monster flick broke movie records when it made "the biggest January opening of all time, [even though] it's turning out to be more of a marketing win than a runaway crowd pleaser at the box office," according to a recent article from Variety. Although Paramount spent about $25 million dollars to make the entire film, it probably "spent as much marketing the movie as on the production budget...which [Paramount] says will easily be a financial success." Even though 'Cloverfield' opened big, it dropped 68% in the second weekend in theaters, which has been attributed to the lack of plot and the fact that the film was "shot to resemble a homevideo."

Many in Hollywood are praising Paramount for the creative and incredibly effective marketing techniques that definitely led to such a big opening weekend. According to Variety, "they eventized the film...they had a finite audience and they burned through it quickly...word-of-mouth takes care of the rest."

Much of 'Cloverfield's' $64.3 million gross profit comes from the fact that Paramount targeted young men and teenage boys with their marketing techniques and relied on their core audience to promote the film through first-hand reviews. 

Although this is a risky practice, the executives at Paramount were not expecting 'Cloverfield' to do as well as it did and were actually quite surprised at the success of the marketing campaign.

This case is clearly an exception and movie executives are not likely to quickly follow suit by relying on their target audience to do the marketing for them. Execs at Paramount were marketing for a movie that is about a giant monster attacking the city of New York. With a film like that, it doesn't make much sense to waste a ton of dough on marketing.