Melbourne Herald Sun, 28 November, 2009
The spectacular success of this week’s money-sucking vampires just goes to show that teenage girls still go gaga at handsome, pale skinned, sexually dangerous young men. And their boyfrends are happy to take them along to the movies in the hope of receiving some of the transferred arousal afterwards.
The Twilight Saga: New Moon serves to remind us that there is plenty of financial clout tucked into the pockets of teenagers’ jeans. The opening weekend pulled $16 million, leapfrogging the biggest-opening Harry Potter films by two million.
In North America it pulled $150 million - huge, but which is actually a lot less than here, on a per-head basis. In the UK, where Twilight fever is equally manic, the first weekend scored $20 million - again much less than Oz when you count the heads. Here we managed to take over a quarter of the country’s cinema screens to satisfy the were-wolf frenzy of the fans.
Teen passions have always been a market driver since before the time of the yo-yo and the hoola hoop. Harry Potter showed how a wizardly schoolyard tale can be as engulfing now as The Wizard of Oz was in great-grandma’s day. And with the addition of endless merchandising - yes there’s already a Barbie Twilight Edward doll - the loot can more than double the theatre takings.
Advertisers watch these fads very closely because such passions can give them an inroad to that difficult-to-penetrate territory, the teenage mind.
We know that among 12-24 year olds TV viewing is at its lowest. Teens watch 50 per cent less TV than their parents. At school they are taught to never accept advertising at its face value, and this justifies their natural suspicion of grown-ups selling them things.
This distrust extends to what they read in advertising on the internet. After years of being exposed to dubious medical promises that they can barely understand, who can blame them?
For the girls there are their teen magazines - against an ebb tide for magazines in general and women’s magazines especially, the ever pink and bubbly Dolly has managed to increase its circulation by four per cent. Celebrities are still big, with the latest Who Did What to Whom mag, Famous, climbing by 20 per cent.
Boys are left out in the wilderness. The only recent attempt to give them a teen magazine, Explode, in fact imploded after a mere eight months. If their hoodies and sunnies make them look hard to penetrate, that’s because they are.
So maybe the answer is screen advertising. The multiplex is the one place where you are guaranteed to meet swarms of teenagers. And there’s no fad like a movie fad.
On You-Tube worldwide interviews show girls, surrounded by obligatory girlfriends and a couple of token boys, clutching each other and swearing they thought they would die when Taylor Lautner took his shirt off. And each claimed to be the very first in her school to see the movie after queuing for most of the night.
Screen advertising has long been the poor relation at the media feast. But right now things are looking pretty good.
Paul Butler is Managing Director of Val Morgan, Australia’s leading cinema advertising network. Naturally enough, he has a smile on his face this week. “This year’s box office is running 16 per cent higher than last,” he said. “We’re very likely to top the $1 billion mark this year.”
With Christmas approaching, life is looking good on the axminster carpets. “Christmas is always a boom time,” he adds, and in just three weeks we’ll see the release of Avatar, another guaranteed blockbuster.
So if you plan to spend any Christmas time with teenage kids, I hope you like popcorn.
Ray@ebeatty.com
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