THB Sidebar: Consider This...
If you are now interested in discussing the details of award season marketing, here is the rule on events, as found in The Academy’s Campaign Regulations…
7. Receptions, Parties and Other Non-Screening Events
a. Prior to nominations: Members may not be invited to, and members may not attend, any dinners, lunches or other such events that are intended to promote an eligible film for awards consideration. However, this does not prohibit:
i. Providing non-excessive food and beverage at the time and place of a
screening.
ii. Inviting members to an event that is unrelated to promoting an
eligible film for awards consideration (e.g., a company party or DVD
release event).
b. After nominations: After nominations are announced, and until the final polls close, film companies are not permitted to invite members to attend any parties, dinners, lunches, or other non-screening events that promote nominated films.
So… based on this… how is Deadline’s Contenders in any way legal?
It is non-screening event that provides full meals and is exclusively about promoting eligible films for awards consideration.
Contenders started as an allegedly not-for-profit event that served coffee and minimal food in the name of trying to convince The Academy that it was okay. There was never any intention to show movies. Essentially, it was, as it is, full day junket for Academy members, with 10 or more films being marketed each day.
Now, the minimum cost of entry, paid to Deadline, is $20,000 a film and the cost to the studios of doing the event is estimated by a few people to be around $50,000. Deadline has started operating this cash cow in events all year long, for television as well as film and internationally as well. The only question is whether this is a 6-figure profit center for Penske Media or a 7-figure profit center.
In addition, Penske engages in exclusionary behavior regarding other media, leveraging events like this, other multi-tiered marketing availabilities, and their near-monopoly on high-cost access to Academy membership, as The Academy averts its eyes.
We have come to time in the Awards Industrial Complex where the cost of entry to get equal exposure to Academy members has become prohibitive to any movie without somewhat deep pockets. And it’s not just The Academy and the ever-grubbing HFPA. The disease is spreading.
I am not, actually, poking at the distributors and consultants who live under this reality. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is how so much of all marketing works and it would be silly to blame the people who respond.
But at some point, one has to look at where the industry is, where it is headed, and commit to the idea of resetting, if needed, to make the entire process more healthy.
If ever there was a moment for this, it is now. Ratings have been at their all-time lowest for 5 years, including pre-COVID, and are not recovering much. All but the very top layer of awards shows are being relegated to streaming, which for all its success in filmed content, has not proven to be as strong as Linear media for live events… at least not yet.
And we just came to the end of the Andrea Riseborough fiasco, in which we saw the surprise success of creating a nominee for a movie that came into the season with the least power and money and access of any nominee flipped into a nasty accusation… that this contender was (somehow) more powerful than studio-based contenders and that this power was exercised against legitimate racial complaints about awards groups.
There are other suspect manipulations of the regulations, including those memorialized by The Academy itself…
In an attempt to strengthen this effort and streamline the mailing of awards materials to Academy members, ALL sanctioned items for eligible films must be sent using an Academy approved mailing house. Any film company that wishes to send materials to Academy members must follow this protocol.
… which has led to an explosion in…
9. Third--party Distribution
Film companies are prohibited from doing indirectly, or through a third party, anything that these regulations prohibit them from doing directly.
a. They may not use subscriber-based publications to distribute prohibited promotional materials to an Academy member unless the member is a subscriber to those publications.
b. The Academy defines “subscriber” as a member who has taken the
intentional step of requesting that a publication be sent to them on a
regular basis. The member does not necessarily have to pay for that
subscription.
c. Any Academy member who has not made such a request, however, will not be considered a subscriber, and any company that uses a publication to send the promotional materials anticipated by this regulation to such a member will be in violation of the regulation.
d. This paragraph is not intended to grant film companies permission to use the services of a third--party publication to send otherwise prohibited promotional materials to member --subscribers where such materials are sent alone and not in connection with the distribution of the publication itself.
What you will notice is that there are no regulations regarding said publications, except for the notion that Academy members need to be “subscribers.”
Are there any Academy members who still pay for trade subscriptions? Why would they? And why would the publications care, as they make all of their money off of selling these “subscribers” to distributors looking to market their films to Academy members? Every Academy member is worth more than $2000 a season in ad revenue to a company like Penske… likely some multiple of that.
But we all look away.
It’s become a business in which we all become Louis Renault in Casablanca.
But it’s not really working anymore. The show isn’t working… the system isn’t working… the cost of playing is increasing, not decreasing, forcing every spender to narrow their range of spending…
We climb the same hill, year after year, expecting things to change. The definition of insanity, no?
And what is the goal?
The Academy requires that voting members of the Academy make their
choices based solely on the artistic and technical merits of the eligible films and achievements.
Well then, Academy… time to make that a priority again… though some will say it never really was what was going on here. Do you want to prove them right or wrong?
Until tomorrow…