Here at io9, we love trailers - but apparently the golden age of the trailer might be on a decline. According to a new study, Trailers are no longer the biggest piece of shared advertising for movies.
The study, by marketing technology company Unruly, found that in the last year, the biggest viral videos coming from Movie studios were rarely actually trailers - they were either 'prankvertorials' (a terrible portmanteau) that promoted a movie through a prank, like Fox's 'Devil Baby' promo for Devil's Due, or even more popular than those, 'trackvertorials' (an equally terrible portmaneau!), music videos for songs related to films.
Music videos are increasingly more common in movie marketing - see the popularity of Disney uploading Let it Go from Frozen online, or more recently the Hunger Games: Mockingjay trailers featuring a soundtrack 'curated' by Lorde - and last year they truly ruled the roost in terms of shareability. Let it Go was Disney's most watched video between September 2013 and September 2014 by far (in fact their 10 highest-viewed youtube videos were all songs and snippets from Frozen), and other studios found just as much success: Ed Sheeran's music video for The Desolation of Smaug was another big one, and whilst for some Studios it was trailers, their views paled in comparison to those for the music videos or pranks.
So does it really mean that trailers are on the way out? Probably not, as they still can do gangbusters in terms of clicks (Trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and X-Men: Days of Future Past were also amongst the most viral movie videos of the year, for example), but what you can probably expect to see is more marketing for movies that builds itself around a particular song or piece of music in the future - look at how Guardians of the Galaxy built its advertisement around Hooked on a Feeling as a good example, or even the BBC's music video for Foxes' Doctor Who performance. In the digital/social media age, virality is more important than ever, and it believe it or not, it does have an impact - Unruly's same study found that people who shared movie content online like trailers and music videos were six times more likely to purchase tickets to see the movies than they would be otherwise. It's a potent force indeed, it seems.
Who knows, maybe it means we could see the end of trailers with the BWAAAAARN-horns in favour of more musical content. I think we could agree on that being a good thing, at least?
If you want to read the full study, you can do so here - you'll have to enter some details to do so though.
[Via The Hollywood Reporter]
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