Business screen magazine (1939-1940)

\,^o V 0^^--:° ^ . , . Fine, but remember your product's SCREEN TEST has only a minute both to make friends and to make the sales for which it was intended • Before you take out your stop watch, pencils and scenario paper and begin to work with the fussy little details of how many feet of film to the minute, you may save your.self endless confusion and disappointment if you are fully aware of the peculiarities of this new. streamlined medium. Actually, the preparation of one minute commercial talking motion pictures follows the same broad principles employed in the creation of all forms of successful advertising — but with three important differences. It is the observance of these three extra factors that should keep you out of the rough, on the fairway, holehigh. Group Selling First: You are advertising to a set group of people, not to individuals. Your magazine advertising or your radio commercials are really individual advertisements, reaching and directed to individual people. Your prospect may or may not choose to read your printed ad. If he reads it and does not approve of it, you have lost nothing except one prospect. His opinion does not influence the balance of your audience. Similarly, your prospect may willingly listen to your radio commercial or he may tune it out. In either case, you have simply won or lost one prospect. Not so with motion picture advertising in theatres. Here your advertising takes a bow before a large, ready-made audience. Should even just one or two people in that audience be displeased with the tone or content of your mes.sage. their restlessness and disbelief will be instantly communicated to everyone else in the theatre. If you have ever heard one person in a theatre audience start to cough and sneeze, you know that a virtual epidemic of coughing and sneezing makes the rounds of the entire audience. If one person in the theatre starts to applaud, other expressions of goodwill follow at once. Such is the mass psychology which your ad in the theatre must face. Therefore, the first thing to remember in preparing commercial motion picture playlets for release in theatres, is to bear in mind that nothing should be injected into the playlets to which any person of any type could conceivably dislike or object. It is even more than a question of infecting your audience — it is a question of having your advertising run or not. Unlike publishing or radio enterprises, the motion picture theatre is not in business primarily for advertising revenue. It keeps its doors open because it makes money from the en tertainment it sells. The theatre manager has only two assets — his wise judgment in selecting pictures and promoting them and the goodwill of the people in his neighborhood. He will run nothing on his screen to which any appreciable number of people object. The situation actually isn t as dark as it seems, because the very fact that scores of screen advertising campaigns have been run and are now being run successfully does prove that consumer motion picture advertising in theatres can be made and is now being made acceptable to theatre audiences. 0.\E Minute — One Objective Second: Your advertisement is on the screen for exactly one minute (variations in length are allowed up to a minute and a third). In other words, your theatre audience has only one minute to make up its mind about your product. Because motion pictures move so fast and because the combination of Sight, Movement and Sound is so powerful, many advertisers are ordinarily apt to crowd as many different details and product uses into a playlet as possible. A study of many successful film campaigns shows rather clearly, however, that a preponderance of the successful playlets employ only one product use or appeal. This simplification of the advertising story permits either successful balancing between entertainment and commercial, or equally allows enough time to be spent in building up one paramount sales feature. Since you would not think, ordinarily, of calling one newspaper ad a campaign or one commercial announcement a complete radio program, you should not regard one "minute movie" as a well rounded commercial motion picture effort. Therefore, the use of only one appeal in each playlet does not cramp your advertising story, as other equally important details may be featured, one at a time, in a series of playlets. Wide Field of Expression Third: In the preparation of copy for the older forms of advertising media, the experienced ad writer knows what technique he is going to employ — balloon copy, big pictures, etc. Over the years there have been, literally, hundreds of outstanding examples of good advertising, which serve as guide posts in the preparation of campaigns. Minute movies are a new medium and there are not so many examples of different techniques to study. Production is still regarded as something mysterious and therefore many advertisers ask what sort of playlets certain outstanding successes in this field are now using. It is helpful to have all this knowledge, but it is a mistake to believe that because Advertiser '"A" uses a certain type of production, that Advertiser "B" should use it also. For most purposes, it may be sufficiently clear to divide production technique into three groups; newsreel type, plot type and entertainment. Under this last heading comes the strictly entertaining playlet and cartoon animation. It seems to me that the choice of technique should not be dictated by successes enjoyed by other advertisers, but rather by an understanding of the product to be advertised. Newsreel Type of Playlets For example, if demonstration sells your product and if the demonstration can be made interesting and instructive, then this technique should be used, because motion pictures afford you the first opportunity you have had for mass demonstration. This type of playlet falls under the heading known as newsreel type. Such playlets are fast-moving demonstrations, built around any product feature or use which can be made exciting, unusual and therefore news-worthy. One manufacturer desired to use "minute movies" for a washing powder. Interesting or cute, entertainment playlets could have easily been prepared. However, there were certain features about this product and its action which were comparatively little known and which offered dramatic motion picture possibilities. Hence, a series of newsreel demonstration type pictures were produced so that, through the use of short screen ads, the advertiser was able to show and describe his unique demonstration in a way never before possible. The Plot Type of Playlet This type, which at least up to the present, has been used less than either the newsreel or entertainment types, consists generally speaking of a plot situation whose solution or denouement brings in a hard hitting commercial at the close of the playlet. Probably not too many types of products and sales stories lend themselves to this {I'leasc liirn to page 32) SOME OF THE PROBLEMS OF 60 SECOND FILM SALESMANSHIP — DISCUSSED BY LAWRENCE ROSENTHAL 116] Screen Advertising 1940