CONTENT GOES Hollywood. (cover story)

This article focuses on how the U.S. motion picture industry is struggling with digital content, as of October 2004. According to figures from the Motion Picture Association of America, online advertising budgets for its member studios nearly doubled from 2002 to 2003. In a statement by Ian Schafer, president of Deep Focus, a leading online marketer of studio movies for clients such as MGM, Miramax, and Dreamworks, the company is allegedly seeing at least five percent of overall marketing budgets for a film being allocated for online promotion. Apparently, while such numbers cannot compete with budgets for television and print, they allegedly indicate a steady improvement in the industry's attention to online audiences. While online marketers are limited by budget, they are also constrained by limited content and how they can access it. Apparently, many outsourced online marketers complain of having to sift through shipments of unlabeled compact discs containing non-catalogued cast photographs and movie graphics.