UCLA

This dissertation explores the intersection between social media and traditional media, focusing on Hollywood studios’ increasing adoption of social media platforms—including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter—to promote their films. In an age when a YouTube trailer or celebrity Instagram post regularly receives more views than a feature film, we cannot understand a movie’s cultural influence without interrogating its digital, promotional surround. Situating my work within the emerging field of critical media industry studies, I draw on interviews with marketing professionals, ethnographic research at industry conferences, trade journals, and textual analysis to uncover the recent history of social media marketing at the Hollywood studios. Innovative digital promotional campaigns for The Blair Witch Project (1999) and The Lord of the Rings (2001) highlighted the early promise of internet marketing. Yet, with studio bosses burned by early internet investments and nervous about online file sharing, most film marketers approached social media with caution, even as consumers embraced the new platforms. As I illustrate, the turning point came when mini-major studios Summit and Lionsgate harnessed social media’s precision, efficiency, and unpaid user labor to build Twilight (2008) and The Hunger Games (2012) into major studio franchises, without major marketing budgets. Finally, Summit’s and Lionsgate’s success inspired the Big Six studios to expand their social media efforts, a phenomenon I explore with a detailed marketing case study of Universal’s Jurassic World (2015). By tracing the studios’ slow embrace of social media marketing, this dissertation reveals the cultural, industrial, and scholarly significance of the uneasy but increasingly unshakable marriage between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Social media has shifted the power balance in Hollywood production. Today’s connected social media platforms obscure the algorithms, data collection, and advertising relationships that drive the tech economy. Even savvy social media users often cannot distinguish between paid advertising and “free” content. Film marketers use this blurred line to their advantage, quietly steering online conversations in a preferred direction. As a result, studio marketing departments that have mastered social media strategies maintain enhanced influence over the viewing experience, in some instances challenging the creative contributions of the above-the-line production personnel, including the director.