Time's recent article, The Smartest Movie Marketing Ploys, shows that movies are having more and more trouble capturing top of mind awareness. Even a megabucks blockbuster like Transformers finds itself with only a one week window to grab audience attention, being squeezed in as it is on either side by the new Die Hard and Harry Potter sequels.

So, if a movie with a budget nearing $150 million is having its fair share of challenges in shouting loudly enough to be heard over the mass hysteria produced by Hollywood staples what hope do the smaller, less financially muscled productions have in developing their own demand?

The Time article highlights the success of Waitress, a film that had to go head-to-head on its opening weekend with the extremely publicised Spiderman 3. With its distribution rights having been acquired for $4 million Waitress went on to gross $17 million at the box-office. Not a bad return for a film that's not necessarily commercially driven.
Then there's Ratatouille. Following on from a number of higher profile Pixar flops the highly original tale of a groumet rat had the lowest grossing opening weekend of any Pixar movie in 9 years. Not surprising considering that it was wrestling with the ogrish Shrek 3 and its glitzy celebrity cast. However, two weeks on and Ratatouille is still riding strong in the US charts, and currently sitting at number 3 Remy the Rat is rubbing shoulders with the John McClanes and Voldermorts of the cinematic world. The net effect of its sustained performance is that Ratatouille has grossed $120 million so far and has restored a lot of faith to a troubled studio that had until recently been looking for a big hit in all of the wrong places.

The quality of the pictures themselves of course plays a huge role in their eventual success, but one wonders just how many undiscovered treasures are out there due to a lack of good marketing from their studios. This has resulted in a certain evolution of film marketing, and with many of these films targeting niche audiences or looking to more effectively communicate their offering the Internet is playing a more important role than ever.

A short while ago the online campaign for any movie consisted of the obligatory MySpace page and the movie's own website. Now we are beginning to see some more creativity in action.

Waitress, a chick-flick of note, provided online recipes for 'I hate my husband pie' on its website. Time's analysis of this marketing tactic: “Give the chick's a place to roost.” The Simspons Movie is pushing the use of Simpsons avatars for adults' online communications.

Ratatouille perhaps provides the most startling example of how not only is the online world changing the marketing of movies, but of how it's making the marketing of movies so successful that it may soon start changing the types of movies being backed by the studios. For Ratatouille Pixar kept it simple and pretty low-key. An extended ten minute online clip of the film was released online and soon enough the Internet's viral nature allowed for positive reviews to spread.

Favourable word of mouth is what saved the French rodent and his kitchen from relative obscurity and put them among the very top tier of animated movies.

For film lovers this doesn't come a moment to soon. Recent stats have showed that 10 years ago the amount of top-grossing films comprised by original pictures was somewhere in the region of 60%. Nowadays that figure is closer to 30%. The fact is that studios don't feel that they have enough room to broadcast the quality or appealing nature of an original flick. Too many trailers, too many billboards, too many other sudios shouting – all resulting in the public being bombarded by a barrage of “flash”. All that a studio could hope to do was shout louder than its competitors.

Now it seems that moviegoers are finally tiring of the flash-in-the-pan effect of big trailers and overly-hyped films. There have been too many Phantom Menaces and Spiderman 3s for the public to trust studios' marketing efforts.

With our trust in the studios having been compromised we are increasingly looking for more transparent, niche-oriented marketing. And it seems that some parts of Hollywood are responding.

PS. Be on the lookout for some more creative virals out there, such as that done for next year's The Dark Knight.