Movie Market Research Fractures More – Who Will Change the Game?

Once again, the movie industry fractured just a little bit more today. Ipsos OTX, one of the leading market research firms, sold its worldwide motion picture group to a group of investors led by Vincent Bruzzese. That’s the same impulse that propelled Reed Elsevier to sell Marketcast, another major market researcher, to a similar group about a year ago.

These are the outfits that quietly rule over Hollywood marketing: testing trailers, conducting research screenings, tracking opening weekend and gauging consumer fandom.

The big global players -- Ipsos, Reed Elsevier -- are getting out of the Hollywood game, a sign of their inability to figure out how to make the fast-evolving business function in their standardized business models.

This leaves the research landscape peppered with three big players, including NRG (still secretive enough not to have a logo). All are now independently owned, and they are joined by a handful of breakaway companies started by executives who used to work there, including Kevin Goetz and Catherine Paura.

Also read: Ipsos OTX Sells Motion Picture Market Research Group (Exclusive, Updated)

But with all this fracturing, there really isn’t much change. None really embrace innovation offered by the age of social media. None have fundamentally rethought the way to go about understanding the habits and hankerings of moviegoers.

“We need transformation, not renovation,” Shelley Zalis (pictured), the CEO of Ipsos OTX, who founded OTX a decade ago and sold it to Ipsos, told me in a conversation on Tuesday.

She added: “The studios want to evolve. Everyone wants change, but the truth is it’s scary. They’ve got to be willing to be a little afraid. And be willing to put some things away.”

But what will the studios put away?

Zalis, who is currently at Ipsos, recalled how NRG founder Joe Farrell fundamentally changed the way market research was done in Hollywood. For decades -- through the 1980s and 90s -- Farrell (who died last year) was the big kahuna who knew the secrets of every movie mogul’s opening weekend and who monopolized the industry by bringing social science and rigorous research techniques to the process.

Also read: Vincent Bruzzese on MPG Sale: The Consumer Has Changed, but Not the Way We Do Research

In the 1990s entered Joseph Helfgot, a Yiddish-speaking, former sexologist and sociology professor (true!) who founded Marketcast and brought his own unique insight to the research founded on those principles. He was the first significant challenge to Farrell, and became a regular on the call sheets of the moguls.

Zalis, in this century, pioneered the use of the internet in conducting market research, which was previously done in person or by phone.

“When I started doing online research, I couldn’t walk in the door and say, ‘Here’s a new way,’ she recalled. “For a long time I had to sign in (on the lot) as Jane Doe. If Joe Farrell saw me signed in anywhere on the lot, the meeting would be cancelled.”