Zack Silver: Toy Story 3 promotion

This spring my internship did a big promotion with the upcoming Toy Story 3 at major colleges throughout the country. The idea behind it was that students in college now were big fans of the Toy Story films when they were younger, and have strong interest in seeing the new film. Last year’s Up was a big hit in general, but also with the college audience. Disney wanted to do a screening of Toy Story 3 with college students across the country, with the hopes that they would spring the word to those who haven’t seen it on how great it was.

We had to hang flyers across the campus advertising “characters” in the film. One of them was about the toy dinosaur, and advertised an archeology club that would discuss him. Students could pull of a tag at the bottom of the flyer, and go onto a website to get a free ticket for the screening. I attached the pictures of the flyers for you to see. While this was a good idea, and it did get a lot of attention, there was one big problem with the promotion.

The screening was only going to be the first 65 minutes of the movie, a movie that would in total only be 90 minutes. They main reason being the film wasn’t done yet, and they wanted to get this screening out before college kids went home for the summer. However most people, myself included, didn’t want to see only 65 minutes of a movie. So interest dramatically dropped, all across the country. The screenings for these “cliffhanger screenings” (the 65 minutes ended with a cliffhanger), did very poorly in almost every college across the country. Temple only had 75 students out of a 250 seat theater, a number very low in industry standards. All the reps that worked on this promotion sited the reason as no one wanted to see only part of the movie. If it was the whole film, this screening would have sold out quicker than anything. However Disney decided to not rush the film, and showed only what they had done. They consider this promotion a failure, and hope change the strategy if they every do this again. I for one believe that it would have completely sold out if it was the full movie, and hope they can have it done in time for college students if they plan on doing this again.