It’s time for movies to abandon costly TV ad campaigns

Last week, The Hollywood Reporter broke down the big swings indie distributor, Neon’s taken in its biggest year yet at the box office, which includes the pop culture sensation Longlegs. The outlet noted that Neon didn't "take out a TV ad for Longlegs, which is unprecedented for a wide release." Typically, movies opening in over 2,000 American theaters don’t just utilize TV advertising. It’s a costly cornerstone of their marketing campaign. A month before its release, Warner Bros. was spending roughly $10 million a week on TV ads for Ready Player One. In 2015, the same studio spent $44.5 million and $40.6 million on TV ads for Get Hard and Entourage: The Movie, respectively. Those TV ad spends were either more or equal to the budgets of the movies they were promoting!

Even after COVID-19 shut down, studios were back to spending $75-150 million on marketing campaigns for movies big and small by summer 2022. It’s all part of a trend of spiraling excessive costs in Hollywood. In 2014, The Hollywood Reporter claimed movie marketing costs were $4.3 million and $36 million in 1981 and 2007, respectively. At the time of the piece's publication, those costs ballooned to $40+ million for mid-sized titles and $200+ million for blockbusters.

In the past, the exorbitant costs of promoting movies in a crowded cultural landscape (as well as the decline of physical media from its early 2000s peak and other factors) have been seen as a key reason Hollywood studios abandoned mid-budget movies. Romantic-comedies, big-screen comedies, romantic-dramas, they’re not perceived as being big enough grossers theatrically to justify costly TV ad campaigns. Perhaps Longlegs shows there’s a way forward for studios on this front, though. It’s time to rip off the band-aid and finally abandon TV ad campaigns...at least for smaller movies.

Saying this back in 2011 or even 2015 would’ve been heresy. In 2024, it feels like saying in 1928 that someone shouldn’t just rely on horse-and-buggies to get to destinations. Cable and broadcast viewership kept hitting new lows in 2023. The news hasn’t gotten much better in 2024. This doesn’t mean the small screen is a desolate wasteland that nobody should make new media for. It’s just that it’s no longer the go-to space for promoting movies. You’re not getting nearly enough eyeballs for all the money that you spend on costly TV ads. Shell out all the money you want, The Fall Guy won’t really benefit from all that small-screen exposure. That’s just not the medium you use today to get people’s attention for new movies.

Instead of throwing money at the wall because that’s what you’d do in 1995, it’s time for major movie marketers and studios to come up with more creative campaigns thinking out of the (television) box. In breaking down the Longlegs marketing campaign, ScreenDaily noted that the featured eschewed more eye-catching promotional material excitingly specific to a movie about a Zodiac killer pastiche. Old media was utilized in the form of a Seattle Times newspaper advertisement. That ad evoked those Zodiac Killer messages that appeared in papers decades earlier. Meanwhile, that aforementioned Hollywood Reporter piece about Neon's 2024 successes highlighted a billboard (which reportedly cost $8,000-9,000 to rent). It implored people to call a phone number that led them to a message spoken by Nicolas Cage's Longlegs Killer. The mystery surrounding this vicious figure (who was concealed in the marketing) made that phone number impossible to resist.

With a marketing campaign that apparently cost quite a bit less than $10 million, Neon scored one of the strongest domestic opening weekends ever for an independent horror movie. The lesson here shouldn’t be that every movie should now have creepy billboards and newspaper ads. Instead, make marketing campaigns deeply specific to an individual movie that catch people’s attention. Think of all the generic promotional campaigns plaguing modern comedy movies. Even hysterical gems like Blockers and Booksmart get saddled with derivative trailers and commercials. Such ads were so poor that you later have to reassure people “No, I swear, the movie's good!”

Instead of saturating major TV programming with such generic ads, let’s get specific with these promotional campaigns. Why couldn’t an original R-rated comedy have the kind of immediately evocative teaser trailers Longlegs had? Why can't a new YA-novel adaptation have outdoor advertising that becomes the talk of social media? If your raunchy comedy involves, say, librarians, why not create billboards parodying those posters where celebrities endorse reading? Even award-season dramas skewed toward adults could get in on this trend. 2022’s excellent underseen Steven Spielberg feature The Fabelmans, for instance, had a marketing that was too vague and emphasized “prestige”. Why not instead get the feature on radars with social media promotions encouraging folks to film their own home movies?

The possibilities are endless for marketing great new movies across various genres when freed from the confines of TV advertising. Best of all, these cheaper promotional campaigns would remove one less obstacle to studios creating mid and low-budget motion pictures. If a new theatrical release inherently costs $40+ million to promote, studios will opt for a safe superhero movie/remake/sequel instead of an original title. New romantic comedies and other mid-budget features having Longlegs-sized marketing budgets could make them more enticing for studios.

This plan might sound, if not foolproof, then at least something worthy of trying on a couple of smaller films a year. The big problem, though, is the owners of TV networks. NBC, ESPN, ABC, and CBS, are all owned by conglomerates that also own major movie studios.  In the wake of Ronald Reagan basically eliminating restrictions for corporations (that fascist monster really ruined everything), big companies began gobbling up movie studios and TV networks throughout the 1980s and 90s. A big example of this was Disney buying Capital Cities/ABC in 1996.

Nearly 30 years later, a handful of conglomerates own nearly all the major TV networks. Paramount Global owns CBS, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon (among others). Comcast counts NBC, USA Network, and Telemundo among its small-screen empire. Meanwhile, Disney controls FX, ABC, A&E, Lifetime, History, Disney Channel, and others. Entities like WarnerDiscovery are suffering mightily thanks to the consolidation of cable and live television viewers. However, they’re going to wring every last dollar they can out of television while they can. That includes television advertising. These companies aren’t going to do what’s best for film promotion long-term if they’re so concerned with small-screen revenue.

It's no surprise that Longlegs eschewed TV advertising at an indie studio that doesn’t own a TV network. The disparity here alone should suggest to the American government why big conglomerates shouldn't exist. Good luck getting anyone in political power to listen to that reality! With this conglomerate-related reality firmly in place, it’s doubtful movie studios like Warner Bros., Disney, and other entities will recognize the future staring them straight in the face. We need to find better, more exciting ways to promote non-blockbusters to people. Weening away from an exclusive reliance on costly TV marketing would be a great way to do that.

Let me be clear: this piece is not an obituary for TV nor a call for conglomerates to wipe out all jobs occupied by folks in TV. Small-screen advertising will undoubtedly continue into the future for the biggest movies of the year looking to reinforce their pop-culture omnipresence. However, this summer’s Longlegs took a big bold gambit eschewing TV advertisements. That risky maneuver working out big time should inspire other cost-conscious creative ventures in marketing non-blockbusters. That could lead to increased audience interest in mid-budget movies among moviegoers, not to mention potentially making studios more comfortable green-lighting new rom-com, comedies, crime thrillers, etc.

Spending $40.6 million on Entourage: The Movie TV ads were already a grotesque sight back in 2015. It’s a downright bamboozling spend in this current age of TV viewership. It’s time for movie studio marketers to find other ways of creating awareness for movies beyond TV ads…though our current media monopoly landscape could make enacting that urgent mission an impossibility.