Borat Movie Is #1 Thanks to... YouTube?

I was fortunate enough to watch parts of the movie, "Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," and a prequel last night thanks to my friend Miguel and the wonders of YouTube, the video-file sharing site owned by Google. But according to theglobalist.com, I am only one of some six-digit population that received this "privelege."

"Borat" is a mockumentary about the famous fictional Kazakhstani TV personality Borat who goes to the United States to make a documentary. He is played by the well-known provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen of the successful HBO's Da Ali G show. You can view the trailer for the movie below.


Grossing over $35 million in the U.S. alone and $20 million in the foreign market, its no surprise many people like myself want to go see the movie after viewing some of its content on YouTube... Mind you this movie was done with a measly production budget of $18 million. As Mario Sundar, author of "Marketing Nirvana," puts it, Borat opened in the least amount of theaters (837) compared to "Snakes on a Plane"(3,555) and "Farenheit 911"(868) but made the most money in its first weekend at the box office- $26 million, doubling "Snakes"($15.3 mil) and beating out "Farenheit"($24 mil) by about two million dollars. In fact, the article on "The Globalist," entitled "How Borat Exploited Google," says "With the help of millions of fans, Borat has effectively exploited YouTube - without paying anything to its owner."

That's right, in compensation for the over 2,000 YouTube video clips related to Borat, Google received comments running somewhere in the six-digits- and that's it. There is no media planning involved in this marketing campaign, its all viral, and for the now million-dollar richer "Borat" movie- free.

As Evgeny Morozov, author of the article, writes, "To the delight of everyone involved, several deleted episodes and lengthy real scenes had been posted online well before the movie premiere, raising everyone's appetite for the actual release of the movie." One of these scenes is shown below.


MarketingProfs: Daily Fix goes into the detailed marketing plan of the Borat movie which includes a Myspace profile (a social networking Web site), a fake press conference against the government of Kazakhstan, a failed attempt to invite "Supreme Warlord Premier George Walter Bush" to the movie premiere, and controversial news items. These unplanned public relations tactics include the government of Kazakhstan actually taking out four-page ads both in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, the European Centre of Antiziganism Research accusing Borat of “defamation and inciting violence against Sinti and Roma (gypsies)," and meeting with every TV personality possible from "Saturday Night Live" to "CNN."

What does this mean for the future?
* Companies like 20th Century Fox promoting copyrighted file sharing
(instead of filing law suits for it)
-Why hate it when its helping boost sales and create movie buzz? After seeing the success, they released more and more content on YouTube.
* Two-minute audience
-It is tailored to fit the short attention span of today's young people, who are more comfortable watching a two-minute clip on YouTube than spending two hours trying to unriddle a complicated plot.
* A Web 2.0 Blockbuster
-It received great viewer feedback on the Internet alone, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that it really debuted in movie theaters.
* People earning a living from YouTube
-Morozov suggests Google should start figuring out how people can make a living from YouTube. They certainly could have increased their own profits if they figured it out atleast for themselves.
* Bridging the needs of everyday people with professional contributors
-YouTube risks morphing into a bottomless reservoir of boring videos made by people with too much free time and too little artistic talent (for which, however, they often compensate with obscenity). Avoiding this would require Google to draft a business model that could bridge the needs of professional contributors, big entertainment studios, and regular users — all of whom have an interest in making YouTube work.

As Morozov puts it, if this succeeds, Borats will be reporting from all over the world in no time.