The Impact of Advertising on Box Office. An Empirical Analysis of the French Motion Picture Industry. ACEI Conference, Kyoto, 2012. (original) (raw)

The impact of advertising on box office. An empirical analysis of the French motion picture industry.

The nature of cultural products makes their success very unpredictable (de Vany, 2006). Nevertheless, producers mobilize marketing strategies in order to increase the visibility of their products and thus reduce this uncertainty. We conduct an empirical analysis of the promotion of films released in French theaters in 2009 (n=495). We assess the impact of advertising spending (as measured by Kantar Media) on box office, and compare it with other variables such as film critic and word of mouth. We perform a regression analysis, which leads to several results: advertising spending is the main determinant of the success of a movie; but films distributed by major companies have a better chance of success. Word-of-mouth and film critic have a significant effect on sales made after the release week. Eventually, we observe that the link between advertising expenses and success is stronger for large and small film budgets, but gets weaker for medium budgets - which are spent by “large independent” companies.

Success in the Film Industry: What Elements Really Matter in Determining Box-Office Receipts

2012

This paper attempted to answer the research question, “What determines a film’s success at the domestic box office?” The authors used an OLS regression model on an expanded data set of 497 films from the randomly selected years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2011, taking the top 100 films from each year. Domestic box-office receipts served as the dependent variable,

ADVERTISING MEDIA STRATEGIES IN THE FILM INDUSTRY

The primary aim of this paper is to estimate the multiple determinants of film advertising expenditures in four important media, namely television, press, outdoor and radio, in the United Kingdom. First, television advertising, the leading film advertising medium, is examined as part of a system of equations, capturing the interdependencies between advertising, the number of screens on which films are initially shown and box office revenues. Then a reduced form model is put forward to reveal the determinants of film advertising in the four media. While major distribution companies have different preferences for the use of the alternative advertising media, results highlight the importance of quality signals, such as critical reviews, in determining advertising expenditures in the film industry. Moreover, advertising expenditures can themselves be considered to offer potential cinema-goers signals of film quality.

Reviewing the reviewers: The impact of individual film critics on box office performance

Critics and their opinions or critical reviews play a major role in many markets. Marketing research on how critics impact product performance has so far examined an aggregate critic effect. An obstacle in studies examining the relationship of aggregate critical opinion and product sales is the close association between the intrinsic quality of a product and the aggregate opinion regarding the product. Our analysis parses out these two effects, allowing us to distinguish individual critics who are simply good at identifying products with popular appeal from those who act as opinion leaders and engender early product sales. The role of critics is especially prominent in the film business, in which one finds multiple expert opinions about each movie and where critics' endorsements are used in advertising. In the context of the motion picture industry, our research investigates the impact of individual film critics on the market performance of movies, where specific key critics and reviewers may serve as market gatekeepers, and where various critics may have different types of impacts on product performance.