I first spoke with Latham Arneson on a Saturday morning in January, when he was kind enough to

share a few minutes from his weekend. Ms. Perry Hewitt, the Chief Digital Officer at Harvard
University and a mutual friend had introduced us.
He was in Los Angeles, making fresh-squeezed orange juice while the California sun streamed in his
kitchen window;
I was in my office in gray, snowy Boston, working on this book. It’s possible he was taking pity on me
Latham currently works at the movie studio Paramount Pictures, but he started his career in a much
more traditional tech role at Microsoft working on a (now defunct) website,
Windows Live Expo, that aimed to compete with Craigslist. After a swift introduction to the world of
tech, he migrated south to LA and joined Paramount’s interactive marketing team; in 2008, he was a
part of Fortune magazine’s “Faces of The Future.”
In Paramount’s context, the interactive marketing formula contains a number of efforts, including an
official website for the film, whose launch coincides with the first trailer months before a film is
scheduled to open, as well a variety of related promotions in online advertising (display and search),
with partners (Fandango and MovieTickets, for example), and through PR and social media.

Currently, Paramount executes approximately twelve such campaigns per year. While their primary
purpose is to host content, the sites also can act as analytic touchstones and inform on things like
overall interest levels, who-is-interested based sources, and characteristics of traffic.
However, given the very tight pre-open windows—only a few weeks where major media is spent,
typically—opportunities to read trends (social media, web traffic, ticket sales, and so on) and adjust
site and advertising creative, along with promotional levels and mix, are limited.
And since a film’s opening weekend is an incredibly powerful predictor (even, given viral dynamics, a
self-fulfilling prophecy) of a film’s lifetime performance (well into home media and beyond), once it’s
out, it’s really hard to influence its trajectory
insight drives Latham and his team down two paths. First, within each campaign, whatever
opportunities might exist to make “reads” must be seized right away: “We really need information
on the trailer releases immediately,” says Latham.
“And,” he adds, “of course we need to be cost-effective.” This has meant relying on external analytic
partners who have well-developed, highly flexible infrastructures (Paramount uses Google Analytics,
for example), or unique capabilities, such as Crimson Hexagon (for sophisticated semantic analysis of
social media chatter and volume)
Second is a focus on what can be learned from each promotional campaign in an overall view—
which audiences respond to what approaches—that can be applied to future campaigns. In a sense,
given the reasonable number of “reps” (repetitions, or in this case the dozen films released each
year) available, each campaign is a test unto itself.
Beyond describing and reporting how well films are generating interest, the analytic “holy grail” is to
be able to predict how a film will perform weeks or months before release. Today, Latham notes
that the strongest correlation for performance is with the number of screens a film opens on

his is a “supply-side” driver of course, itself a function of how well the chains screening films think
they will do. A better “demand-side” predictor would help Paramount not only work with theater
chains to get the screen count right, but also to pre-arrange its promotional plans more effectively.
Accordingly, Latham and his team continue work to support the traditional prediction methods by