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January 26, 2009

Slumdog Million-Var

If you want to know how Slumdog Millionaire is costing writers their jobs at Variety, just look on the trade's website.

My first inkling came over the weekend, when ads for The Dark Knight were still running on the Variety.com site. Warner Bros, which was enthusiastically looking forward to an aggressive Phase II campaign for Best Picture, is mostly out of the game after nominations last Thursday. And nothing else was showing up on the site.

Today, it got worse.

Click on Variety.com the first time and you get a Benjamin Button pop-up. (Watch for Par’s Phase II push to ramp down too as the weeks go on.) And then, look at the front page. Ads for Variety. A small side ad for an international sales group. Click again, as ads cycle through. More in-house “ads” and a congrats to Richard Jenkins, also in the small side slot. Again. In-house only. Again. The same.

As we have all known for years, The Trades are businesses where the majority of their annual revenue comes from Oscar ads. Without them, they are out of business.

Variety hired staff away from The Hollywood Reporter to secure its position as king. And THR was (and is) crippled. But in this economy, the switch gets flipped and when it’s life or death, the question must be asked… how many ad dollars is this piece of talent creating for us?

A dearth of Phase II ads, which must have been apparent to everyone in Variety ad sales by last Thursday afternoon, means that anyone hired as Oscar sales bait was on the line... right that second… probably as planned for weeks prior with Thursday as the expected tipping point. And it tipped in the wrong direction.

I believe I wrote about it at the beginning of this Oscar season. If we at MCN end up taking a 15% hit on ad sales this year – and it will likely end up being something like that – we are fine. Fewer extravagances… fewer additional hires… no redesign this year… that kind of thing. But for the trades, a 15% hit for a successful, but much smaller operation like MCN likely means a hit of more than 25% to their Oscar sales. That’s millions of dollars.

Even in a bad economy, studio vanity would have demanded a lot more ads for Phase II had the studios believed that their movies could beat Slumdog in the big race… or that heavy advertising in support of lead actors, directors, etc might change the fate of those races.

But they do not.

And as a result, layoffs.

Conversely, the failure of the LA Times to take big steps into the Oscar ads game with The Envelope, a borderline success or failure, depending on your perspective, keeps this from being a crisis at that paper. They aren’t paying real money to anyone there… and at least on name person who was working for The Envelope and making decent freelance money hasn’t been paid in a timely fashion by the paper. So, the small staff rolls along, awaiting more pressure on the talent that still works full-time to fill column inches for that enterprise.

Posted by dpoland at January 26, 2009 03:21 PM

Comments

Posted by: Chucky in Jersey at January 27, 2009 09:08 AM

Posted by: David Poland at January 27, 2009 11:58 AM

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