Digital marketing and business innovation: entreprising cultural firms

Social networks and digital life could reveal themselves innovative marketing tools for cultural firms. Manufacturing firms are now experiencing digital environments, advertising their merchandise in virtual stores (plus Second Life). If word of mouth is the main offline marketing tool for most of Italian Cultural Industries – from performing to visual, from movie to concerts -, connections with a virtual word of mouth could be better exploited in order to sell shows/exhibitions and raise funds. As we know, new technologies have created communities connected not anymore by the same geographical area but by the same interests. Afterwards movie industry, principally the U.S. movie industry, has chosen to explore their potential, developing many digital marketing campaigns. According to a new report published by the MPAA and Yahoo, 73% of U.S. moviegoers use the Internet to conduct research about movies before going to the theatre. Furthermore new techniques, overall to obtain the fidelity of the young audience, have been recently improved, using the growing diffusion of mobiles and videogames. For example, very often viral campaigns become ARGs, alternate reality games, that go on even for a year, as happened for the movie “The Dark Knight”. Moreover in the U.S. one of the most visited movie website called Flixster has bought an Iphone application so that you can read reviews, know show-times and even buy your tickets for the nearest movie theatre. The main aim of the paper is to examine the maturity of the technological evolution of marketing in Italian cultural firms, combining literature and case histories analysis.