Cuban's response

Mark has started perusing the hundreds of ideas for improving movie marketing and so far he’s not impressed.

Discounts? Bah.

This has been shown time and time again as matinees , coupon books, frequent buyer programs, and multiple ticket package coupon books are important, but not primary drivers of getting people out of the house.

Online marketing? Nothing new here.

Its expensive to get people to go to websites and not easy to get video distributed virally. … There are few if any movies that dont put up websites, load some video on sites, do myspace pages, etc, etc.

What’s missing is what Mark wants — a way to change the economics of movie marketing. My suggestion is multi-pronged and has the benefits of TV advertising without the expense. The message gets out to millions of people and doesn’t require advertising to them in order to draw them to the place where you’re going to advertise. The message is placed where they already are.

Mark Cuban also complains that “in order to get MILLIONS of people converted from [viewing an ad] to going to see the movie, which of course was the initial goal, it would take TENS of MILLIONS of people [seeing the ad].”

There’s where my concept completely changes the economics of marketing. Mark, your conversion rate stinks because your targeting stinks. Break your demographics into smaller chunks. It’s all about micro-targeting, baby.