For your remote consideration: How Hollywood trades are cashing in on studios vying for awards during coronavirus crisis

By Kayleigh Barber

It’s Hollywood’s favorite time of year —awards season — and film studios and TV networks are allocating their marketing budgets to reach a rather small, but influential, subset of the entertainment industry: awards voters.

Normally these efforts, called “for your consideration” (FYC) campaigns, would include many in-person screenings, cocktail parties and Q&As with high profile celebrities that convene the around 50,000 awards voters in Hollywood.

In the time of coronavirus, however, studios vying for votes are leaning more on trade publications like Variety, TheWrap, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline (the later two declined to comment for the story) and publications with a Hollywood-focus like the Los Angeles Times, to promote the projects they hope will win anything from best picture at the Academy Awards to outstanding lead actor or actress in a comedy series at the Emmys.

“The live, in-person piece is critical to the race,” said Sharon Waxman, CEO and editor-in-chief of TheWrap, adding that it’s an opportunity for voters to exchange ideas before casting votes. But as that cannot safely happen right now, “trade publications are much more important in the award space this year,” she said.

Publishers are hosting the virtual events to facilitate those conversations online. But this year, the custom campaigns on all mediums from podcasts to print inserts are designed to capture the valuable voter eyeballs pursued by the swarms of online content published during the pandemic.

“The amount of shows vying for your attention has increased, forcing advertising to extend from a timeframe perspective and also experiment with new ways to engage the audience,” said the Los Angeles Times’ chief revenue officer Josh Brandau. “The need [for content] to be stickier has never been more necessary.”

In January, TheWrap hosted 40 virtual film screenings for film studio advertising clients, none of which had fewer than 20,000 people on the live streams, Waxman said. Not all of the viewers were voters, she said, but the online events had a much larger scale than any of the traditionally staged in-person events would be able to host.

In addition to virtual events, Waxman said that FYC campaigns also include digital advertising for the site’s editorial awards, which represents a larger portion of the publisher’s FYC revenue than the virtual events. Waxman would not disclose the exact amount of revenue FYC advertising brings in for the company.

Usually the fourth quarter is a bigger time for spend in the FYC category, Waxman said. But with the Oscars getting pushed back two months, spend on awards promotion did not truly start until January. “Everyone is having a great Q1 for sure,” she added.

Though Variety is one of three major Hollywood trades owned by Penske Media (THR and Deadline are the other two), it is the only brand with a content studio, which it launched in 2017, according to CMO Dea Lawrence. And the studio has played a special role in Variety’s FYC content business this year, allowing it to do extensive print and …read more

Source:: Digiday