Indie movie studio goes for low-cost digital marketing

Los Angeles

TAKE a quiz about your open-sea survival skills on Buzzfeed. Score maybe seven out of 10, marking you as the type who might make it through a mid-ocean disaster. And up pops an offer of, say, 30 per cent off the standard US$15 price to buy Against the Sun, a new feature film about real Navy fliers who spent 34 days adrift on the Pacific during World War II.

Brutally direct digital sales techniques are standard stuff for e-commerce marketers offering credit cards, resort vacations, shoes or even books that match your presumed tastes or mood of the moment. But movie marketers have been slower to adopt contemporary online equivalents to the classic foot-in-the-door hard sell. Too slow, by the thinking of Joe Ricketts and his colleagues at his American Film Co.