Homer Hickam Quotes

In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.

Before any movie of yours gets made, it will be vetted by the studio's marketing department. So, you do have to answer the question: Who is your movie for?

We saw that our customers required help beyond the data sets they had and that they could benefit from a wider opinion. So we built SurveyMonkey Audience, and we've now got 4 million users who signed up to take surveys. Our clients can choose the demographic they want to hear from, and we can provide that sample.

When you know who your customers are, that can give you an edge on the competition.

To go back, the mistake that Universal Studios made with 'Dawn of the Dead' was that they didn't have enough money or cared enough to make a soundtrack.

If the same energy went into marketing movies to women as they do on the other demographics we might see more of a spike.

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

You don't have to put dresses in a movie to make girls like it.

A changeling is one child substituted for another. I couldn't find anything more apt. We had to kind of fight that supernatural element in the publicity, and I offered to try and find another title, but Clint liked it, and it stayed.

But, the thing is, since I always had my own little shop and direct access to the public, I've been able to build up a technique without marketing people ever telling me what the public wants.

How do people know what they want until we show them?

I think that Tyler Perry's genius really has been to tap into the domestic market. He knows what his audience is based on, having toured America for so long, and then giving them the blueprint for his films prior to the films coming out, and then the films have the built-in audience because they've seen it in theaters already.

Too many bar owners built a bar for themselves... when they should have built what their market and demographic demands!

Advertising is full of great thinkers. This is a powerful industry and does a lot more than we take credit for.

There is a lot of content out there for the female demographic.

I think they've finally realized that women go to see movies as much as men do. Ticket sales are coming from them as well, so why not appeal to them? I think they're finding a way.

I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.

You have this idea that you think is awesome. You want to have that broadest group you possibly can. You don't want to just talk to 1 type of person and learn that, you want to get familiar with the space.

Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.

Most startups are not just built for the person who is using them. When you do that, every now and then you get really lucky and... are representative of some huge class of people who all want the same thing you do... but very often that just turns into a side project that doesn't go anywhere.

Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market - define your customers - then find or develop a product for them.

Our basic audience begins with creaking elderly types of twenty-three and above.

There are things that are happening way earlier than that when it comes to someone deciding whether they're going to spend x amount of millions of dollars on a movie. I want $100 million success. The moviegoer is the person I'm more interested in than the Academy.

The people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn't vote in the last election. The propagandists are leading us down the wrong path.