Blogger Chris Thilk shares his New Year's wish list for strategies that will help bring movie promotions into the modern age of digital marketing.

I've been writing about movie marketing for over two years now and have seen my fair share of innovation in that time. Most of it, though, has come in just the last six months or so of 2006. Sony created an official website for "Casino Royale" that was fully RSS enabled, shooting out updates whenever the site was updated with new content. Warner Bros. successfully used the blog they set up for "Superman Returns" to achieve the same result, publishing when new trailers or other content was available on the site. Sony, again, created a stand-alone blog for next year's "Spider-Man 3" that offers fans a chance to interact with one of the movie's producers.

So, this being the time we look ahead to the potential that a new year brings, I thought I would list some of the things that I would like to see in 2007, building off these good first steps.

• RSS, RSS, RSS: This year, I hope studios start to understand that they should be making it widely known when new content on their film is available, or when something of interest is happening? With RSS, it's easy for fans and curious users alike to subscribe to updates. There are still some studios that insist on e-mail alerts but, personally speaking, something is more likely to get lost in an email inbox than it is in an RSS reader-- which I use to easily mark a news item for later blogging and, therefore, promotion (hint, hint).
• Link out: Remember, no matter how much information you might provide on your film, it's very likely that someone out there has more gathered in one place. How can someone have more information on the movie you are creating, you ask? Well, think about period movies that contain historical information. Still think you're the end-all / be-all resource for your film? The official site for "The Good German" contains just a little bit of information on 1945 Berlin, the movie's setting, but not much. This could have been drastically improved by providing links to outside articles on that place and time. The official website for the movie "Munich" is one that did a great job of linking to articles and references about the events that movie was based on.
• AJAX ain't just for scrubbing sinks anymore: Right now I'd guess that most movie websites are created using either straight HTML or Flash. But AJAX, an XML-based coding standard that's actually a mash-up of a bunch of different coding formats, is becoming more and more popular. I'd love to see a major (or even minor) studio take a plunge and create a site using AJAX. I'm actually drooling right now just thinking about it. I'm serious. What AJAX allows you to do is create a visually dynamic page, just like Flash, but without the loading times that come with Flash. It's just as cool but is much more user-friendly since you can easily edit stylesheets and other aspects of the page in a way that's more efficient for you and the user.
• YouTube, Brutus?: If you're not putting your trailers on YouTube I just don't know what you're thinking. It's easy, and it gives audiences a high-quality version of footage to view, rather than having them search around for clips that, say, someone recorded off the movie theater screen with their cell-phone from the back row of the theater. Corporate quality control mixed with allowing people to embed the video on their own blog is a powerful driver of sustainable interest and promotion.
• Niche = power: Which tactic contains a better return on investment: a mass market campaign where only 20 percent of the audience is likely to be interested or a niche campaign that reaches fewer people, but 80 percent of those that it does reach are likely to be interested? Yes, the latter might be a bit more work than the former, but the value of targeting the right consumers is well worth the effort. And as the internet makes it so easy to find and communicate with these niche audiences, I marvel that it's not done more.
• Reach out and touch someone: A recent study showed that one in every four results from a Google search for a brand name pointed to consumer-generated content. That means the general population is responsible for at least 25 percent of your marketing. Seek out people who have your film on their radar - good or bad. Talk to the groups you discover talking about your film. Let them help you actively engage the online community in discussions about your film. Would you intentionally create a comprehensive promotional campaign and just decide, for no reason, that you were going to just not worry about finishing 25 percent of it? Well, ignore your brand advocates, and you're doing just that.

I'm actually hopeful that more studios will begin, in 2007, to embrace their online constituencies, as well as continue how best to use new media in their marketing campaigns. The year 2006 saw some studios that had crawled in 2004, and then begin to learn to walk in 2005, start to make solid strides. Let's get film marketing to really fly in 2007.

Chris Thilk has been writing about movie marketing at Movie Marketing Madness since May 2004. Read full bio.