With the nominations out and the ceremony less than a month away, the Academy is jazzing up their promotional efforts in hopes that people will actually turn in to watch the ceremony on February 22. Last year's broadcast was the lowest-rated ever, and with a bunch of low-grossing movies up for Best Picture this year, there's not exactly a lot of incentive for everyday moviegoers to tune in.
To pique your interest, the Academy has started the website BiggestMovieEvent, which steals a page or two from the playbook of some of the best online marketing campaigns for movies in the last year. Lots of interactive buttons play fake trailers for the ceremony, question you with Oscar trivia, or play clips from famous acceptance speeches. There's also a new poster, displayed below, which promotes the ceremony as "The Biggest Movie Event of the Year."
The New York Times wrote an article about all this, interviewing Michael Benson, a marketing exec at ABC who has worked on promoting this year's ceremony. Benson explains, "“How do we make this relevant to an audience. We want the audience to feel like they can participate and are an insider in a way.”
I still have my doubts that anyone beyond movie fanatics will watch the Oscars after the red carpet, even if we all continue to make moviegoing choices based on which film got how many nominations. But it's at least smart for the Academy to throw the internet a bone, and bother to establish a site that might be interesting beyond bare-bones facts. The Academy continues to be a group that's struggling to keep up with the times, so while these new online efforts may be five years late, they may be a sign of even bigger things to come.
