Film director Quentin Tarantino knows how to push the envelope in his movies. His latest film, "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," features comic-book style characters and graphic martial arts action. It debuted number one in the box office, raking in more than $22 million in the first weekend and almost $70 million since October 2003. In addition to the cinematic themes, the film's promotion strategy also pushed the envelope. The movie studio employed an online data strategy to help propel its success.

Ian Schafer, president of Deep Focus, which marketed the film online, says that the studio, Miramax Films, chose the online channel in part because it could put a name and face on the movie ticket. "Certain efforts were made, via participating sites to 'cookie' users who interacted with advertising from the first film, in case we wanted to subtly and contextually tailor messaging to them for a follow-up campaign," Schafer says. The group is only in the rudimentary stages of data collection, but for an industry with historically none at all, these first steps are important.

"The numbers do speak volumes," Schafer says. "By using customer data to measure the impact, it was important to leverage the best tools that Miramax had [at its disposal]." The campaign produced more than 3 million unique audience interactions (including more than 2 million trailer downloads) as a direct result of the promotion. Miramax was able to collect moviegoer information from the campaign in anticipation of the sequel.

For "Kill Bill: Vol. 2," Miramax plans to leverage its data even more efficiently. "Advertising will be more effective if we interact with the people who downloaded the trailer for the first movie," Schafer says. He admits the online marketing budget may be smaller for Vol. 2 (estimated at about 2 percent of the overall film marketing budget), but predicts it will have a bigger impact because of the quality of interactions.

"Ideally, armed with the right data, studios will be able to glean information about their audiences, learning how their marketing dollars are affecting viewing intent and appeal," he says. "A real-time flow of this information will allow them to shift spending on-the-fly, as every day is crucial given the relatively short theatrical shelf-life of most films."

Analytics for the everyman
Financial services, insurance and other data-saturated industries are naturally primed for the use of data tools. For other sectors with less data available (such as entertainment), the strategy may not be a top priority. But at the recent DoubleClick Insight conference in New York, James Kim, DoubleClick's senior director of Strategic Services, made the case for deploying a strategy driven by customer insight, even for companies without a traditional database strategy.

Once a firm decides to collect data, the more important question becomes what to do with it. Without understanding customer data in the context of a business challenge, it's pretty much useless, Kim notes. Analytics can help to implement a well-developed data strategy. "Analytics applies reporting metrics [such as page hits and sales conversions] to everything you can control. It puts your metrics in context and leads to actionable recommendations to increase ROI," he says.

"Analytics doesn't tell you the 'why,'" Kim explains. "It tells you what happens." He suggests team members meet on a regular basis to talk about metrics, what they mean, and how they relate to the overall business. "There always needs to be someone who really understands those numbers," he says. Hiring an analytics expert isn't common practice yet, but more firms are realizing their value, Kim says.