Archive for the 'future trends and ideas' Category

Monetising word of mouth

Posted in future trends and ideas | Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 | No Comments »

Robert Young writes on GigaOm about an idea for pumping new life into the cinema experience. It was a response to Mark Cuban’s call for ideas on how to get people out to the movies. Here’s Young’s idea:

Whenever anyone goes to a movie theatre, they end up with a ticket stub. I would propose that you create a program/system to make those ticket stubs into currency… essentially a coupon that can be passed around, traded, bought/sold, etc.

Allow me to illustrate with a hypothetical. Let’s assume I went to see The Pirates of the Caribbean on opening day and I paid $8.00 for my ticket. I leave with a ticket stub that has been date/time-stamped. Then sometime during the following week, I run into my friend Sarah at Starbucks.

During the course of our conversation, I tell her that I had seen Pirates and recommend that she should see also it. As a friendly gesture, I pull out my wallet and give her my ticket stub. Sarah decides to go see the movie the following weekend, and since exactly one week has passed since my ticket stub was stamped, she is entitled to receive a $1.00 discount. Now, had she waited two weeks to see the movie, she would have received a $2.00 discount.

He explains:

What I am proposing is akin to institutionalizing word-of-mouth into a capital market, where the ticket stub becomes the currency. Not only is this concept likely to increase the volume of movie-goers (as any consumer goods promotional expert will attest), it is also likely to impact the distribution curve of box-office receipts… when the vast majority of movies are released into the theatrical exhibition window, they normally go through a fairly consistent demand/revenue curve at the box office… essentially, box office receipts are cut in half with every subsequent week.

I think this is a very clever idea. People love a discount and tend to feel pained by the cost of going to the theatre. This would help keep the window for theatrical release from collapsing more, and would give those films that are going to thrive on word of mouth more of a chance.