How A Wet T-Shirt Can Shoot Up Movie Sales
June 19th, 2006 by Mike Reining Read more about Copywriting, Popular, Site DesignI was walking in Chinatown a few weeks ago when a DVD caught my eye. It was a pirated copy of George Clooney’s Academy Award nominee “Good Night and Good Luck”, a movie about the McCarthy-Era Communist Witch-Hunt in the US.
Here’s the original version of the DVD cover you see being sold in the US.
It looks nice, serious and slick. Perfect for a movie of it’s type you’d say.
But apparently the Chinese pirates don’t think so.
Realizing that many peope buy movies with visual-appeal (read: sex and violence) rather than dialogue they decided to ‘spice’ up the cover. Here’s what these enterprising pirates came up with.
When you’re selling anything online — whether it’s an ebook or a software you developed — make sure to create a good looking virtual cover for the product.
We tested this with an online meditation course we were selling online. Our meditation course was purely digital. It was described well in our site copy and supported by glowing testimonials.
Since the product was digital there was no way to photograph it. It was a series of online meditation instructions that came with an MP3 audio file.
You can see a copy of the online course signup page here.
As an experiment, we wanted to see how much a fancy 3-D virtual cover would do for this product. We browsed the internet to identify several products that claimed to offer the best virtual cover designs. Finally we settled on one.
It took us 1 hour to pick our product and then 2 hours to play around with Photoshop and design a mock cover.
Our cover was not amazing — but it was decent. We then spent the final hour loading our Photoshop creation into the virtual cover software product and produced a 3-D version of our course.
The virtual cover looked like this:
A week after adding the virtual cover to the site, we tallied the results.
Amazingly — our simple virtual cover led to an 18% increase in signups!
Since a high number of signups convert to sales, we estimated that this one simple change boosted our annual revenue by as much as $30,000. Not bad for 4 hours worth of work!
Even if the product is not shipped at all but downloaded, a good virtual cover can significantly boost sales. If it doesn’t look good, it aint gonna sell.
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About the Author
Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype.
Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.
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Vishen Lakhiani
I have seen an interesting cover for Capote where Philip Seymour Hoffman was surrounded by flames and nymphets like a latterday James Bond. These things have just got to be collectors items.
I’ve seen those redesigned covers in Hong Kong too. Haha. I think that’s the beauty of a free market. They’re targeting new markets with the same movie. I was tempted by these things as a teenager who didn’t know the movies ahead of time but as a local I can see how it’d be amusing and I wouldn’t mind it because in the end you have to hold onto the cover art so it might as well be sexy. Being misled would suck but I still think it shows good use of creativity
I’ve lived in China for 2 years, and it is DVD heaven. My favorite is when they put a user comment from IMDB on the back cover as a review. The best is when they paste a negative review from IMDB. Or, a review from the wrong movie. Spider-man being described as “a tender English schoolboy spends time in the countryside and discovers himself”, or Ghandi as “Fantastic! This ought to get anybody out of their seat and make them take notice! Once it gets going there is non-stop action and violence”
Could you tell us what product you used for the virtual cover ? I’ve been looking for something like that and would appreciate a recommendation.
uh, that cover is not from a China pirated dvd, its from an Indonesia pirated dvd, the tell tale sign is the “9” displayed in the middle. (The 9 means its a dual layer dvd). these dvd’s sell for US$0.50 without the plastic casing, or $0.60 with.
Well, that’s a different take on Goodnight and Goodluck! Do you suppose it might just be that the pirates assumed the contents and hadn’t even seen the movie. It is, at any rate, hilarious.
[…] No, I am not making this up. This is the cover the DVD pirates have made for their version of Good Night & Good Rack […]
Is it just me or has anyone noticed that the American “DVD” cover isn’t really a DVD cover, but the cover of a CD?
The main hint being the “With Music from and inspired by the motion picture” Along the top. Oh and the lacking of actor’s names what-so-ever.
This cover changes everything. Why I’d pay to see that movie now.
My flatmate found a pirated Pink Floyd CD with rainbows and clouds on the case. And they spelt it “Pink Fzoyd”. There was also a “Gun & Rose” CD. Needless to say, they don’t work anymore…
oh yeah
Even better: I’ve seen the same strategy applied to Pride and Prejudice.
[…] We called our post “How a Wet T-Shirt can Shoot Up Movie Sales” and I submitted it to Digg and Reddit. […]
Adding a wet t-shirt to our video blog has certainly boosted traffic considerably. Come to think of it, we may just make the whole show a wet t-shirt episode.
[…] the post had a picture of a hot AND wet chick in a wet T-Shirt. In fact its title was “How A Wet T-Shirt Can Shoot Up Movie Sales.” 14) Be irreverent: Want to stir people up? Make fun of their god, their politics, their […]
We buy with our eyes, that much is for sure.
And if the audience/market is mostly male, and attractive woman always works. At least as far as getting their attention.
the act is that sex sells. i have come across many chinese boxsets that have had the cover simply created the way the fraudster felt it should look…lol
Thank you for this entry. I am glad I found the blog. I will sure visit more often. What spam protection do you use? I get tons of spam in my blog which sucks.