Official Trailer
Disney Music Group VP of Marketing Rob Souriall on the ‘Frozen’ Soundtrack’s Success
In order to create buzz for the soundtrack’s first single, “Let It Go,” which was originally performed by Broadway star Idina Menzel, Rob’s team had singer Demi Lovato record a different version of the song that was released as a single before the soundtrack came out. “Musically, Demi’s song was done a little more mainstream,” said Rob. “It was something pop radio might be a little more open to, and with her built in fan base, we knew we’d have a big publicity and social play. It helped us roll out an asset before the film opened.”There are currently 60,000 user-generated-content videos related to “Let It Go” on YouTube, which has accounted for more than 600 million streams. Since Disney is now claiming their compositions and master recordings on YouTube “that means that any time somebody decides to sing a cover version of our song, or they shoot a video and use our track or master recording, it goes into a massive database, gets flagged on the back end of YouTube, and if that user sells advertising around the video at all, we now get a larger share of that revenue,” said Rob.
How Disney Turned ‘Frozen’ Into a Cash Cow
Binyamin Appelbaum
The
Patriot Center at George Mason University, half an hour west of
Washington, is a popular place to watch concerts, college athletics,
professional wrestling and other events that command the attention of
the adult world. But no event in the 29-year history of the arena has
attracted as many people or earned as much money as last month’s
performances of “Disney on Ice Presents ‘Frozen.’ ” For six days, waves
of little blue-and-white Princess Elsas — and quite a few costumed
parents — sang the movie’s hit song, “Let It Go,” at the top of their
lungs, enjoyed $15 snow cones, posed for $25 pictures with cardboard
cutouts and waved plastic sticks, which had miraculously become $28
magic wands.
Behold
the bewitching power of branding. In the year since Disney’s latest
princess movie, “Frozen,” opened last November, Elsa and her sister,
Anna, have rapidly become two of the world’s most successful product
endorsers. Disney said earlier this month that it had already sold three
million “Frozen” dresses in North America, which, as it happens, is
roughly the number of 4-year-old girls in North America. In January,
“Frozen” wedding dresses go on sale for $1,200. Next summer, “Adventures
by Disney” is offering tours of Norwegian sites that inspired the
film’s animators at prices starting north of $5,000. The company is also
rolling out “Frozen"-branded “apples and grapes, juice, yogurt,
bandages and a complete oral-care line.” Disney estimates that “Frozen”
brought in more than $1 billion in retail revenue over the last year.
The chief executive, Robert A. Iger, told CNBC that he expected holiday
sales to be “very, very hot.”
The
creators of “Frozen,” Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, told me that they
set out to create characters young girls would recognize. “I love
Cinderella,” Lee says. “Am I anything like her? No. I grew up and became
someone more independent.” Elsa and Anna, she says, “are princesses
because they’ve got the weight of a kingdom on their shoulders, not as
the solution to a happy ending.”
They
realized they had succeeded, and then some, soon after the movie was
released, when they went to see it like ordinary people. Lee found
herself in a New York theater, where many audience members already knew
the words. Then she started to hear people singing on the street. A year
later, they haven’t stopped. Does she ever get tired of hearing “Let It
Go”? No. Not really. Not yet. “When I’m old, it will be the only thing
left in my brain,” she says.
Brands
are said to be in decline. Studies show that customers are less loyal
to companies, quicker to try something new. Products increasingly rise
and fall on their own merits. “Brand names have become less important as
proxies for quality,” says Itamar Simonson, a professor at Stanford
University. He argues that consumers now get better information about
products from the Internet. But Disney, perhaps more than any other
large company, appears to be impervious to the trend. It helps that the
company is not selling products based on the quality of craftsmanship,
but based on the quality of its stories. Disney also specializes in
selling affordable luxuries. An Elsa dress is considerably more
expensive than an ordinary dress, like a cup of Starbucks coffee costs
more than an ordinary cup of coffee. But it is not that
expensive. Every item of the dozens of “Frozen” products at the Disney
store cost less than $100. More important, though, to Disney’s success
is that many of its best customers are still learning how to read and
don’t care what things cost. It’s not as if toddlers check out Amazon
reviews.
As
a result, Disney is in the midst of a golden age of profitability.
Disney characters have been endorsing products since 1929, when Walt
Disney put Mickey Mouse on a writing tablet. But licensing, which began
as a sideline, has become the main event. In most years, Disney makes
more money from selling branded movie merchandise than from the actual
movies. “We create products that extend the storytelling — the emotional
connection that the consumer has when they’re seeing the film carries
on in the three-dimensional world,” says Josh Silverman, the executive
vice president for global licensing. A recent favorite, he says, is the
Olaf snow-cone maker. Modeled after the slapstick snowman who provides
the comic relief in “Frozen,” it emits frosty treats from a somewhat
disturbing hole in Olaf’s belly.
The
popularity of “Frozen” is also buoyed by the expanding toy market for
girls. Princesses may seem like a permanent feature of the toyscape, but
they were less common before the 1990s. “The idea that pink princess
fantasy dream dolls have always been a part of girlhood is false,” says
Elizabeth Sweet, a lecturer at the University of California, Davis, who
studies the cultural history of toys. Sweet has found that the
popularity of gender-neutral toys reached a peak in the mid-1970s. Since
then, toy makers have embraced the market-doubling effect of pushing
certain toys to boys and other toys to girls. Sweet says the level of
gender segregation has never been higher. A typical big-box store might
have four aisles of blue toys and four aisles of pink toys with an aisle
of yellow toys in between. “Separate but equal,” she says. Legos, for
example, evolved from simple packs of building blocks into play sets
mostly sold to boys, often with brand tie-ins. In 2012, the company
introduced Lego Friends, which are basically Legos for girls.
Disney
really began to focus on princesses in 2000, after a new executive went
to see a “Disney on Ice” show and was struck by how many of the girls
in the audience were wearing homemade princess costumes. “They weren’t
even Disney products,” the executive, Andy Mooney, told the writer Peggy
Orenstein for her book about the rise of princesses, “Cinderella Ate My
Daughter.” The Disney Princess line now makes about $4 billion a year,
on par with the earning power of Mickey Mouse himself. (The “Frozen”
girls are not, as yet, official members of the Princess ensemble.)
This
market has similarities with, of all things, the pharmaceutical
industry. Drugs are marketed to patients, who tend to trust brand names
over generics, and are paid for by insurance companies, under their
contractual obligations. This has an inflationary effect on drug prices,
leading to those eye-popping numbers that send the uninsured fleeing
U.S. drugstores to try their luck in Tijuana. Similarly, toys and the
like are marketed to children and purchased by parents. People who would
never buy a $15 snow cone for themselves will buy one, gladly or
grudgingly, for each of their children.
After all, who wants to say no to their princess?Disney’s ‘Frozen’ is sending tourists packing for Norway
Travel Weekly Michelle Baran 06.07.14
VisitNorway partnered with Disney in October, in advance of the film’s November release, to introduce a global marketing campaign to raise awareness about the destination, on which the fictional kingdom of Arendelle featured in the film was based. |
How Disney Will Make 'Frozen' a Billion-Dollar FranchiseDaniel Kline The Motley Fool 14.05.14 |
 |
Every Time You Sang Along To 'Frozen,' You Capitulated To Disney’s Carefully Orchestrated Marketing Plans
Laura O'Reilly, Business Insider Oct. 16, 2014
Read More
Even if you’ve not actually seen Disney’s Frozen at the cinema, you’ve no doubt heard about it somewhere online.
Between the official Disney promos, the YouTube video of a dad and daughter singing along in the car to "Let it Go" (13 million views), or the outrageously cute nurse and teeny girl hospital patient belting out “Love Is An Open Door” — it’s inescapable.
And that was exactly Disney’s plan.
Of all the official online movie ads uploaded by the six big studios this year, almost half (44.2%) of the views went Disney’s way, according to a new report from Unruly. All of Disney’s 10 most-viewed videos (including videos that were paid for and those that weren’t) were related to Frozen.
Disney/"Frozen"They won't be sending any cease-and-desist letters.
And unlike most of the other big movie promos between September 2013 and September 2014, Disney's online content push actually peaked after the film’s premiere. People weren’t just searching for the trailer, they were looking for clips of the movie — which Disney duly served — generating millions of organic views and spawning off thousands of related user-generated videos. Notably, those user videos have not been taken off YouTube at Disney's request, even though YouTube has a robust system for spiking copyright infringing content. We don't know whether Disney deliberately turned a blind eye to other people publishing Frozen song videos, but we can say those videos actually helped Disney's marketing of the movie — free advertising, in other words.
The top-shared Frozen videos were clips of the film launched on YouTube after the movie opened. In fact, the official trailer did not even rank in the top 10 shared videos of the 12 month period studied.
Why is this important?
Unruly says that almost a third (31%) of moviegoers who watch a movie promo (presumably whether that’s paid-for, organic, or a fan version not even made by the studio itself) would purchase a ticket to watch the film, and 28% they’d rent it.
The movie, which had a $150 million production budget, has grossed $1.2 billion at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo. The Unruly study doesn’t provide the exact link between those who saw Frozen videos and those who then went on to see the movie at the cinema, but it’s clear that the huge buzz Frozen has amassed online has built enough intrigue for people to dig into their pockets and watch the real thing for themselves.
What the study also demonstrates to film studios is that their strongest “trailers” probably aren’t their trailers, which goes against most of the received wisdom from decades of marketing their biggest hits. And they can also learn from this study that if a movie has the equivalent of a music video in it — Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire” video for the new Hobbit movie has more than 34 million YouTube views — all the better.
The two main reasons why people share a video is the strength of the emotional response it elicits and social motivations like shared passions, being part of the zeitgeist and opinion seeking. Expect more studios to get a lot smarter — and a lot more incessant — about the way they advertise their movies online going forward.
Between the official Disney promos, the YouTube video of a dad and daughter singing along in the car to "Let it Go" (13 million views), or the outrageously cute nurse and teeny girl hospital patient belting out “Love Is An Open Door” — it’s inescapable.
And that was exactly Disney’s plan.
Of all the official online movie ads uploaded by the six big studios this year, almost half (44.2%) of the views went Disney’s way, according to a new report from Unruly. All of Disney’s 10 most-viewed videos (including videos that were paid for and those that weren’t) were related to Frozen.
Disney/"Frozen"They won't be sending any cease-and-desist letters.And unlike most of the other big movie promos between September 2013 and September 2014, Disney's online content push actually peaked after the film’s premiere. People weren’t just searching for the trailer, they were looking for clips of the movie — which Disney duly served — generating millions of organic views and spawning off thousands of related user-generated videos. Notably, those user videos have not been taken off YouTube at Disney's request, even though YouTube has a robust system for spiking copyright infringing content. We don't know whether Disney deliberately turned a blind eye to other people publishing Frozen song videos, but we can say those videos actually helped Disney's marketing of the movie — free advertising, in other words.
The top-shared Frozen videos were clips of the film launched on YouTube after the movie opened. In fact, the official trailer did not even rank in the top 10 shared videos of the 12 month period studied.
Why is this important?
Unruly says that almost a third (31%) of moviegoers who watch a movie promo (presumably whether that’s paid-for, organic, or a fan version not even made by the studio itself) would purchase a ticket to watch the film, and 28% they’d rent it.
The movie, which had a $150 million production budget, has grossed $1.2 billion at the box office, according to Box Office Mojo. The Unruly study doesn’t provide the exact link between those who saw Frozen videos and those who then went on to see the movie at the cinema, but it’s clear that the huge buzz Frozen has amassed online has built enough intrigue for people to dig into their pockets and watch the real thing for themselves.
What the study also demonstrates to film studios is that their strongest “trailers” probably aren’t their trailers, which goes against most of the received wisdom from decades of marketing their biggest hits. And they can also learn from this study that if a movie has the equivalent of a music video in it — Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire” video for the new Hobbit movie has more than 34 million YouTube views — all the better.
The two main reasons why people share a video is the strength of the emotional response it elicits and social motivations like shared passions, being part of the zeitgeist and opinion seeking. Expect more studios to get a lot smarter — and a lot more incessant — about the way they advertise their movies online going forward.
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