Universal Studios apparently has a large MySpace marketing budget for the upcoming movie Smokin’ Aces. So large that during my last session, I repeatedly got served three Smokin’ Aces ad placements on the same page. Of course, everybody knows that MySpace has a huge ad inventory surplus, so it seems likely to me that Univeral Studios got a pretty sweet deal on such a bulk purchase. The question I ask is whether three ad placements are more effective than one? My first instinct was no, but I must say being bombarded with Smokin’ Aces imagery really did get me to stop and take notice.

UPDATE: Found an article from AdWeek that talks about Universal’s online efforts to market the film. Apparently there is a Smokin’ Aces action game & sweepstakes on Second Life and a widget that allows you to include the Smokin’ Aces trailer on your blog, profile, etc. I love the widget idea. It’s cheap to make and I’ll guess that 1 widget placement by a user brings better conversion than even 100 ad impressions on the same page. I say this because profile pages on social network sites follow a standard layout (except for heavily customized MySpace profile pages), so our eyes are easily trained to focus on the page content and ignore the ads in the layout. However, if a user places the widget on their profile, it’s much more likely to get noticed because it’s in the “line of sight”. Kudos to Universal for experimenting with these new forms of marketing. I’m sure other studios will follow with their own efforts. It’ll be interesting to see what works.