Thick as A Brick

Help me out here?

According to an article in eMarketer, "the percentage of online ad spending by Hollywood movie studios lags spending on all other media." In fact, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reports that "online ad spending by its members was only 3% of their overall media spending".

If the MPAA has it right, those under 30 are far more likely to be frequent moviegoers than are those 30 and older, and nearly half of all 18-to-20-year-olds saw one or more movies per month in 2005. eMarketer says that 73.7% of 12-to-17-year-olds in the US currently use the Internet, and projects that 83.9% will by 2010.

Even given that more than 50% of US Internet users get their movie information from TV, shouldn't the movie studios be spending more than 3% advertising online?

No one believes more in an integrated marketing plan than I, but the studio marketing mix seems a little nuts or just completely stupid.

Every marketer worth listening to knows we go where our audience is. It is about the "who" not the "what." The only things I can attribute the studios misguided marketing strategy to, besides the ones just mentioned, fall into these categories:

• Ignorance
• Arrogance
• Flatulence
• Corpulence
• Dissonance
• Decadence

So what am I missing?