The Downfall of M T Carney, Disney’s Marketing Manager

Except for M T Carney, Walt Disney Studios’ new president of movie marketing. She wore white pants and white Chanel flats.

A rookie mistake; no big deal: Ms. Carney, 42, had been hired six months earlier and had zero movie experience, coming from a New York marketing agency specializing in packaged goods. But the anecdote ricocheted around the catty movie business, giving visual reinforcement to a judgment that most power players had already made: she’s not one of us.

Despite successful ad campaigns since then for films like “The Muppets” and “The Help,” Ms. Carney has still not found her footing, and Disney appears to have concluded that she never will. The studio has sought to replace her in recent months, making a formal offer to at least one marketing executive at a rival studio who declined, according to people with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the recruitment was private.

For her part, Ms. Carney has made it clear to Disney that she would like to return the focus of her career to New York, where her two young children attend school under the care of her ex-husband. Disney and Ms. Carney declined to comment on her status, but Disney insiders expect her to leave or shift to a lesser role sooner rather than later.

Ms. Carney isn’t a household name, but she holds what is perhaps Hollywood’s most influential marketing position because it includes selling films worldwide from, in addition to Disney, Pixar, Marvel and Mr. Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios. Should she depart, it may say more about the insularity of the movie industry and its resistance to innovation than her marketing talents, which by many accounts are considerable.

“Film is the single most difficult industry for an outside marketer to crack,” said Peter Sealey, a former Columbia Pictures marketing chief who co-wrote the book “Not on My Watch: Hollywood vs. the Future.” He would know: He was a star marketer at Coca-Cola, which sent him to Hollywood after it bought Columbia in 1982. It was a rocky transition, but he lasted six years with support from Coke — better results than marketers brought in by studios over the years from Burger King and McDonald’s.

“It’s a clubby, inbred culture that still operates on instinct over research and an almost religious adherence to this-is-how-we-do-it tenets,” Mr. Sealey added.

Studios like Disney have an authentic desire to rein in runaway advertising costs and innovate with new types of marketing. They have no choice. Global advertising now costs at least $150 million for a major event film, but DVD sales continue to decline and attendance at North American theaters is at a 16-year low. Simultaneously the traditional way of turning out a broad audience — TV commercials — has been undercut by the splintering of television viewing.

But producers, directors, actors and agents often balk at unusual approaches. They just want their film to be No. 1 at the box office on opening weekend, and prefer that marketing experiments be carried out with somebody else’s career.

“You need a psychiatrist if you think Steven Spielberg is going to trust M T to tell him how to sell his films,” said one Disney executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering his employer. (Ms. Carney goes by punctuation-free initials that stand for Marie Therese.)

Part of the challenge for outsiders involves a radical difference in timing. Studios have one opening weekend to persuade people to see a film. When marketing a new hamburger, however, months can be devoted to hooking people. Movie marketing involves dealing with emotional artists instead of more pragmatic business people. And it requires a distinctive type of vision: What is the movie and who is it for? The answer may be two radically different things.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/business/media/the-downfall-of-m-t-carney-disneys-marketing-manager.html?partner=rss&emc=rss