10e20 Blog

Many times before a company launches a product or service, they will roll it out to a test market. You do this to see how viable that product or service will be in the mass market prior to a the full roll-out. This can be a very expensive process but it can also be worth every penny. Would you be willing to spend $1 million to help prevent you from losing $10 million?

I came across another version of this today being run by National Lampoon, the makers of Animal House, the Vacation movies and much more. They have a potentially polarizing feature length film that they are contemplating releasing. It’s called 72 Virgins and it tells the tale of two idiot college students unwittingly join an Al Qaeda cell in order to get the 72 virgins promised to terrorists when they die. This started out a viral film on their website and they now are asking their fans - Should we make this into a feature length movie?

I have seen this spreading through the social networks like Digg and people getting involved in the conversation there as well. Is this the most accurate metric to find out if you should launch a movie? Probably not because anonymity makes it too easy for people to game or influence. But it is a good way to get a quick, easy and inexpensive gauge of how your potential audience or customers may react to a new product or service.

For National Lampoon’s this type of outreach was a no-brainer for a few reasons:

• The idea was built around a film made for the web - so why not solicit feedback on the web
  
• No need to worry about someone stealing this idea - its too unique and would be too easy to prove that it was stolen
  
• Get people on a mass level engaged in the debate. Whether they are for it or against it, they will be talking about it. This means more traffic to their website, more links and more publicity.

Interestingly enough, at time of writing - voting was 3 to 1 in favor of NOT making the movie…