Everyone from Entertainment Weekly (which wrote, “blogs don’t equal bucks;” neither does the cover of EW, evidently) to Adotas (which said all the hype had “little effect on the actual box office numbers”) has been checking in. The conventional wisdom seems to be that the lack of a gigantic opening weekend for Snakes On A Plane should be a sobering wakeup call regarding the broad effectiveness of Internet marketing.

I disagree.

People are staying away from the movies in droves, but Snakes has pulled in more than $30 million so far. As you can see in this chart, that’s better than a lot of movies with better casts that received stronger traditional marketing support. Lucky Number Sleven, for example. Or Thank You For Smoking. Or A Prairie Home Companion.

The real comparison to be made, though, is probably between Snakes and Akeelah and the Bee.

In the squared circle of non-traditional movie marketing, it’s a battle of vipers vs. venti, of blogs vs. biscotti, of cobras vs. caffeine. Snakes had wall-to-wall blog buzz on thousands of Web pages while Akeelah had wall-to-wall promotions in nearly 8,000 Starbucks stores in the U.S.

The box office numbers to date find Akeelah at $18.8 million vs. Snakes’ $30 million.

I think New Line should double down and keep feeding the blog buzz for the DVD release. Why not have the DVD extras be focused almost entirely on the Web phenomenon? Why not feature some of the best user-generated content on the DVD? Why not go behind the scenes of the Internet-prompted reshoot?

Online buzz may not have made Snakes a giant blockbuster, but it probably saved it from languishing in the box office dregs of Slither, Doogal, and Phat Girlz. If New Line plays it right, it’s going to help the DVD do well, too.

Takeaway for marketers: Reports of the death of online marketing have been greatly exaggerated.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.