-By Andreas Fuchs

“In-theatre is very important, as it represents the point-of-purchase,” affirms Chas Evans, senior VP, creative affairs, at Paramount Pictures International (PPI). “Your audience is right there. You are spending a lot of money hitting the right people. So you should do the very best you can to get the very best materials in front of them.”

After profiling several U.S.-based in-theatre marketing executives, for this month’s Cinema Expo International edition we are taking a step not only onto the European stage but also into the global arena. PPI’s Creative Services department is responsible for “supplying all of the invariably common ‘stuff’ that our territories need to release the movie,” Evans explains.

Evans’ understatement becomes obvious in the case of M. Night Shyamalan’s upcoming The Last Airbender. There are “six different versions of the international poster,” he details, “two sets of three different banner artworks; a complete new poster, TV and trailer campaign for Japan; ten different trailers varying from minor tweaks to complete new briefs; a completely new in-theatre campaign including standees and banners—all compounded by the production of local-language 3D trailers.”

Evans and his team make sure that any and all of these marketing materials get made, “including those for in-theatre use, such as trailers and display materials, posters, banners and so on.” His London-based office does not, however, supervise the installation in the theatres. Liaising with exhibitors around the world and making sure that the various items are actually deployed, he advises, “is all done at the local level through the distribution department rather than the international marketing group” that Creative Services falls under. To facilitate communication with theatres and circuits, PPI has representatives in all of its ten country distribution offices (www.paramountpicturesinternational.com).

Evans has worked with the Paramount group of companies ever since joining CIC Video in 1984. After eight years there, he took the opportunity to join the theatrical side at United International Pictures (UIP), where he stayed until PPI launched its standalone operations in 2007.

PPI being a fairly new company that was “sorting our internal systems out,” he recalls, “we decided to find out what actually is the most important item” for in-theatre. “The obvious thing is the trailer and we’ve always thought so,” he notes. After evaluating the ongoing research that started about 18 months ago, “it became obvious that we were not particularly focusing on display materials. We spend an awful lot of money on them but didn’t really know if we were making the right things for theatres. It was almost like chucking it out into the world and hoping that it was used. And those things are really expensive.”

The analysis was part of an attempt “to make better materials and to save money… If we were shipping out 30 standees and ten of them were stuck in a cupboard somewhere, that’s a waste.” As with many good ideas, “the moment we started, we realized that we were actually going about this the wrong way,” Evans admits. “We changed tack very quickly to find out instead what it was that the consumer remembered.”

In doing so, PPI worked in partnership with exhibition. After asking what the filmgoer was taking away from the trip to the cinema, the answer was clear: trailers and big standees.

Acknowledging that the latter have gotten quite fancy over the years, PPI research showed that standees do not necessarily need to be elaborate. “People do it because it’s fun, funky and it’s different as everybody tries to scream out above the clutter.” The complex ones in particular “are also a pain to be put up and 99% of the time you are reliant on the good will of exhibition.”

And cinemas have changed over the years, Evans knows. “They don’t have people hanging around not doing anything. Exhibitors are very sophisticated in the way they structure their theatres these days—with the right amount of people doing the work that is required at any given time of day. You simply don’t have people with time on their hands so that they can just go and put up a standee.” Not to mention that their very assembly should not require one to have a degree in engineering.

Nevertheless, he gives a nod to ever-advancing technology. “If you’re a bit smart, you can actually start to produce standees centrally to take advantage of the economies of scale, even though they are, in fact, adapted for the local needs.”

Further complicating the design and production are timing, availability and pricing, as well as freight. “Deadlines are always tight. Sometimes that means the standee turns up with metal nuts and bolts holding cardboard together,” he muses. “If you produce your standees in America, you’d have to ship them to Europe to be trucked on. That’s costly. If you make them in Europe—we make a lot of our stuff in Austria, funny enough—we have to get everything on a plane to Latin America and Australia. It all becomes difficult. We are looking at creating production hubs so that we can actually print in Europe, the U.S. and Southeast Asia. Thanks to technology, you can pretty much make sure it all looks the same no matter where you make it.”

Another item that Evans is “trying to avoid, whenever possible, is anything electric.” About two years ago, “we actually did go through much research and development on batteries, now that you can buy lights that run on lower voltage. But you still have issues about shipping batteries around the world. So you have to rely on a local distributor to source them for you. You need to test how long they last and exhibitors have to be reminded every two or three weeks to change the batteries.” This doesn’t mean that for key multiplexes PPI would not “enter directly into a dialogue with the theatre about building something bespoke for that location… For general display materials, however, one of my many mandates is to avoid electrics.” Another one covers anything that makes some noise. “That drives exhibitors insane,” he laughs.

Evans observes that “interactivity seems to be something that people like” about displays and standees. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything terribly complicated.” In fact, “people certainly go to see something big,” he chuckles. “Oooh, it’s big…big cardboard.”

Evans says one “classic example” of a big, attention-getting standee is the Simpsons Movie couch. “And Bedtime Stories had a book that one could turn,” he recalls, saluting the work of yet another colleague. In his own house, Evans takes pride in creatively repurposing materials. One example that has become very popular with the public and exhibitors alike is the adaptation of U.S.-style movie character banners. To better suit overseas needs and space availabilities, “we created totem displays, which basically are four- or three-sided cardboard displays that utilize the same art.”

How much more differentiation from the North American campaign is possible and how much local adaptation can happen almost entirely “varies on the movie and the filmmakers,” Evans observes. “With certain people, once they have approved something, there is no more flexibility. That’s it.”

On the other hand, producer-writer-director M. Night Shyamalan “couldn’t be more accommodating” in the promotion of The Last Airbender. PPI has developed “many very different campaigns for Southeast Asia, Japan, Latin America. Even France and Germany have slightly different approaches.” As for the reasons, “there are certain elements that filmgoers react to or they don’t. We tweaked the creative on trailering, for example, to make sure they worked better for them.”

“If you’ve got a day-and-date movie, it all gets accelerated,” he continues. “If you have a global target, it is not always practical to make the trailer in-territory. We have to do it centrally and, with the ever increasing amount of tentpoles—something like 87% of our territories went day-and-date or earlier for Iron Man—we’re quite good now at getting everything to everybody at the same time. Again, because of the digital technology, it is a lot simpler now. We can produce the graphics and picture part centrally, within a day or two behind the English-language version. The territories can check the results online to make sure that we didn’t put an accent in the wrong place or flipped something so that it’s upside-down and backwards. Audio works the same when we stream in a picture reference for the territories to dub to. Then they just squirt us back their audio and we go on to the mixing stage in the States to do the English version, followed by German, French, Spanish and Italian… We just go one, two, three, and they bang out one right after the other. We can deliver everything digitally as well and actually don’t have to ship anything anymore.”

The process has gotten easier, Evans attests. “It’s just a bit pricier, funnily enough. And, like with all that we’re working on, the more you do it, the easier it gets and the more the cost comes down. Digital trailering is definitely moving at a pace and we’re running alongside to make sure that we can deliver to our exhibitors quicker and, quite frankly, in a better quality.”

On the flip side, has something ever gone terribly wrong? “Touch wood, no,” Evans says, sounding relieved. “We had some hairy moments, to say the least. That usually involves some kind of freight issue. When something misses the plane, what do we do now?! But, honestly, we’ve found that necessity is the mother of invention. It’s amazing what you can’t come up with if something needs to get done.”

For excitement of another kind, Evans looks back to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as PPI’s first truly global release. “We were dealing with a very, very careful group of filmmakers who only wanted the very best for their movie,” he recalls. “Trying to get all the trailers made and hitting the same targets was a real, real marshalling of resources. We had spread sheets that we wound up printing on one-sheet size to see what had to be done where and when. From a satisfaction point of view, that was a bit of a landmark for us. Once you’ve done it, you’ve learned another valuable lesson.”

No matter how many times Evans and the PPI team have excelled at yet another record-breaking launch, they are making sure the learning curve continues. By observing “the journey of the filmgoer” through ongoing and expanding research, “we want to find out what he or she is expecting, what he or she remembers… Hopefully, this will help us create better materials for the exhibitors and provide more insight into what is expected from the movie theatre.”

One “fascinating” item that has already come to the forefront is trust. “The filmgoer trusts what the local cinema tells him or her much more than they do anywhere else. This goes back to our point about how important it is to get the environment right. Most people are skeptical of advertising. When they see [something] that says ‘The Smash-Hit Movie of the Summer,’ they go ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah…I’ve heard it all before.’ But when they get information at the cinema, they trust it. They like to be guided and experience a sense of discovery at the cinema. It is a good place to focus your energies. Absolutely.”