To the Movies with Big Data

Word of mouth and ads to promote a movie have been overestimated. A recent paper by Sebastiano Delre and two coauthors from the University of Groningen (The Effects of Shared Consumption on Product Life Cycles and Advertising Effectiveness: The Case of the Motion Picture Market forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research, with Thijs Broekhuizen and Tammo Bijmolt) shows that the main driver is the so called shared consumption: the desire of people to enjoy a nice cinema experience with someone else.

The paper has three main contributions. The theoretical contribution is the individuation of the new social effect. There is a strong methodological contribution, based on the model used: a simulation model. In the past, the academic community used to consider these models something like toys, but the use of big data to validate them has been a real breakthrough. In this way the results are much more robust and the work is legitimate to academics and practitioners.

The managerial contribution is in the awareness that too much money is spent in advertising. Studios want to capitalize on share consumption and don't know any other way to do it. But now we know of the effect and we can use other tools, such as social media.

Listen to Delre talking of his research in a video for the #BemacsTalks series