What's in a Name?
LOVEFiLM CMO Simon Morris explains why videogames are a natural extension of the brand's film-orientated roots
LOVEFiLM launched in early 2004 after a series of mergers and acquisitions. Five years on the brand has become synonymous with mail order subscription film rentals in addition to providing the infrastructure for the likes of Tesco, WH Smith and Odeon to run their own branded rental services.
Simon Morris, LOVEFiLM's chief marketing officer, has been with the company since its inception having previously worked with SEGA UK and BSkyB in marketing director roles, Chris Evans' TV company Ginger Television Productions as MD and then co-founding the dot com content brand 365 Corp.
Here, Simon talks about the importance of strong brand identity, the benefits of an active user community and how LOVEFiLM as an 'entertainment platform' could prove a natural ally for the videogame industry.
The thing that has stuck with me from my time with SEGA and then with the subsequent companies through to LOVEFiLM has been three key principles: range, value and convenience. Those principles ran through SEGA at that time and are present at LOVEFiLM today along with distinctive branding that differentiates us from others in the market.
Well, just to dial back a bit, we can specifically target various advertising methods at specific groups of LOVEFiLM's customer groups and so the Assassin's Creed II advertising run will have been sent to carefully selected customers. It's a technique that a lot of companies claim to have but often don't actually have the data to back up those claims.
Over the last six years we've built up LOVEFiLM to be the UK's largest online subscription community and the third-largest subscription business of any kind in the UK, after Sky and Virgin Media. We've done that through our focus on great customer service, great products and great brands and based on those three key principles of range, value and convenience, we've also developed a very clear understanding of what our brand is all about: it's an entertainment platform. During this time we've collected a huge amount of data to aid with our marketing.
Fairly early on we saw a big crossover with the games industry, and I'm sure you've seen the data about games generating more revenue that DVDs and Blu-ray for the first time last year. What we're able to do is examine the film and videogame tastes of our customers and so target the advertising of relevant products at those customers; the advertising of Assassin's Creed II was specifically targeted in this way.