“Nede chudandi babu Nede chudandi… mee abhimaana theatre lo…Aalasinchina aasabhangam…”

All the Telugites should have come across this sound at least once in their lifetime.

You must have had cycle-rickshaws with mike sets crying out similarly about the new movie hitting the screens.

You must have an announcer bawling out loud with a dappu about the movie on stores that week.  – Of course all pretty much a part of the promotion activity back those days.

Can you believe they had pamphlets thrown out from an aeroplane about the film named Prapancham (1953) produced and directed by Moonaas [a Srilankan businessman]?? Well of course they did! And our parents or grandparents might tell us tales of yet another unique promotion of LavaKusa (1963) by revered director C.S. Rao. They reportedly had two twins draped in ‘Lava-Kusa’ getups and toured around the state promoting the film. They say there was a time where film people came to the door steps of each and every household and invited for their film screenings [And that’s what we call “Bottu petti cheppadam” in Telugu].

Fast forward>>>

In this second decade 21st century, promotions have perched up from posters to ‘Wallposts’ in Social Networking Sites. You know they too have learnt to be social [winks]. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry has a page to promote whatever crap he writes/makes and you only need to know the original ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’ out of the fakesters. And movies have rightly boarded up the social media wagon and started promoting their content predominantly on social forums like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn with exclusive pages, websites and blogs developed on their films. By the way you have your fans always encouraging you in everything you do - even sipping coffee! At this juncture, how can we ever forget about Youtube/Dailymotion?! Can you deny if we say the number of Youtube hits have become a parameter to gauge competition and the criteria for success today? No, you can’t!

And our Google bhayya has stepped in at the right moment and says he can predict the fate of a movie’s opening weekend collection with the Google searches and Youtube searches we hit.

He brings in his new concept called “Quantifying Movie Magic with Google Search”, in fact a study which says

"At four weeks out, trailer search volume on Google coupled with both the franchise status of the movie and seasonality can predict opening weekend box office revenue with 94% accuracy."

Or to put in simple words, the more people searching for a specific movie, the bigger the box-office weekend, according to Google. So, a month prior to your film release is actually enough to apparently decide the fate of the film. And here, the biggest beneficiaries would be the distributers and obviously audience. Of course, there are disadvantages too – who would prefer to watch a less anticipated film! But never mind, a film with content shall always find its audience.

Anyhow, at the end of the day, it’s just a prediction and all this is nothing but evolution and we are happy to witness this progression which had no recession! Tee hee!