TRENDSETTER: 20th Century Fox Film’s Bettina Sherick talks about Risk-Taking in Digital Marketing
In her 9 years working in international marketing at 20th Century Fox, Bettina Sherick has seen a world of change. Now as Vice President of International Digital Marketing, she oversees Internet and mobile marketing strategies, as well as digital marketing content development, to insure that movies like AVATAR attract global audiences.
According to Ms. Sherick, “We're always taking calculated risks. For example, we were the first studio to use MSN Messenger themepacks, for our film FANTASTIC FOUR. We were the film international film studio to do a multi-territory homepage masthead buy on YouTube for WOLVERINE. We were the first international film studio to buy a virtual gift package on FACEBOOK for ICE AGE 3. We were the first to do a three-screen buy on Microsoft for AVATAR.
Those are the risks that have worked for us. There have been those that haven't worked; however, if everything you try works, then you're not taking enough risks.”
As to the challenges of marketing multi-nationally, Bettina Sherick believes there is much more awareness and discussion about international markets nowadays. Yet she concedes that there is still a fundamental lack of understanding of how to actually do international marketing.
In addition to the larger considerations about how to bring a product into a culture through PR, editorial, or creative choices, there are other basics. She says, “We still face issues when marketing partners resort to simple translations services like Babelfish, or don't understand the difference between single-byte and multi-byte fonts, or get confused by the idea of a dateline, or don’t realize that date formats are different. Other issues involve tech support companies that don't configure their CDN properly to handle international traffic. The devil is in the details.”
A native of California, Bettina Sherick was named an Internationalist of the Year for her ground-breaking work.
