Image credit: Roland Reiner Tiangco
Yesterday, Warner Studio announced that they're going to test renting The Dark Knight through/on Facebook. I like it. Anecdotally speaking, I've noticed many college students and post-college people using their laptops and computers to watch movies and TV instead of owning an actual TV.
Given that alone, being able to rent movies one-off through Facebook simply by looking up their official fan page is a pretty interesting idea. Beyond that, there are two things in particular that I like about this "test."
First, they're simply going for it. They want to see if it will work and (I assume) rather than polling a bunch of people to ask them if they're interested in watching a movie through Facebook, they're letting people's actions do the talking.
As Martin Weigel pointed out recently, "You can't test what doesn't exist." This also reminded me of a post from Seth Godin noting how Netflix didn't test three of their most important decisions because they couldn't.
The second thing I like about this is how they're hedging their bets by picking a movie with nearly four million fans. Let's see, if my math is correct then even if only one-percent of those fans watch the movie, that still generates close to $120,000 at a cost of $3/rental.
Now, I have no idea what it cost them to develop the platform that lets them stream movies through Facebook, but this way, instead of paying a company to do research for them and pay participants to answer questions; they're getting people to pay them to watch a movie which is in essence, paying Warner Studios to participate in research.
How's that for a reversal of standard marketing practices?
This is a very smart idea which also exemplifies agile business.
@clweinfeld
Posted by: Carol L. Weinfeld | 11 March 2011 at 01:19 AM