The Ohio Sci-Fi and Horror Marathons

We'll be running a bunch of television ads for the Marathon starting Monday. About 100 between now and the marathon, including during the Scream Awards this coming weekend. They will run throughout the Columbus metro area.

This should get a lot of attention and hopefully finish selling out our tickets in the next 5-7 days. Look for a lot of new faces.

Next year, we plan on starting the ads sometime in August so we can have the ticket sales finished in September.

-David

What television stations will air the ads? Will the ad be posted on youtube?

I suppose I could put it on YouTube.

We have fixed spots on WHAT'S EATING YOU (10/13), NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (10/19), and SCREAM 2010. I believe we took two spots for SCREAM 2010.

In addition to the fixed programming, the spot will run in rotation on Comedy Central, Food Network, NatGeo, E!, AMC, Spike, History Channel, A&E, and others.

David

Hmm no over the air stations. Most likely you went to Time Warner, Insight, and or WOW cable systems and they will insert the local ads due to commercial breaks. The only cable I can get is Time Warner and I refuse to deal with them. They say that I need to rent a HD set top box and I keep telling them my Samsung HDTV tuner can process QAM signals. Example My tv can decode any ad supported cable network HD feed without needing that box. My "pay tv" as of right now is Netflix and HULU Plus.

I had a similar issue with TWC I just needed cards for my HD TIVOs. I finally had to go to the State Cable commission at which point TWC finally found some lying around.

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The wages of sin are royalties.

Nope, no over the air. Less than 7% of the Columbus Metro area use over the air broadcasts in lieu of cable. Not much of an audience there, including the fact that the majority of those people are generally much older (last number I saw had a median of something like 63 with a range of +-10) than the target audience for the marathon.

Even then, the cost of over the air advertising is orders of magnitude more expensive than cable spots. What I pay for 200 30 second spots in a month might pay for one over-the-air. And then I'm reaching tens (if not hundreds) of thousands fewer people.

-David

Interesting so much advertising will be done. Is this a result of too few tickets being sold so far?

My guess is that this is not any sort of reaction to any kind of sales figures. I'm sure that this was planned all along, because that is what you do when you want to make an event like this successful--advertise. Get the word out months in advance to plant the seed, make sure you have an ample number of bankable films at your disposal, then hit them over the head towards the end to ensure a packed house.

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Aliens? Us?
Is this one of your Earth "jokes?"

No, we're just using our regularly scheduled ad time to promote the marathon. We (the theatre) would like to have done this last year, but we didn't have our contracts in place.

One of the problems with the marathons is that relatively few people know they exist. We're hoping the ads bring some "new blood" in to replace people who have moved on or away.

As an aside, it would be nice if ticket sales were front loaded, since the proceeds from the sales are used to pay for the rentals, talent travel/fees/per diem/lodging, etc.

-David