The Walt Disney Company has created a new Facebook application that allows consumers to buy tickets for movies and then recommend their friends to come along.
The Walt Disney Company has created a new Facebook application that allows consumers to buy tickets for movies and then recommend their friends to come along.
The service which will be launch with Toy Story 3 is a first-of-its-kind application that analysts are saying could transform how Hollywood sells movie tickets by interweaving purchases with the powerful forces of social networking.
The service, which could be launched in Australia, also allows movie goers to pre book a movie seat weeks out from a screening. The big drawback is the cost of integrating the software with existing booking systems used by cinema chains.
Launched in the US last week early results indicate that people are using the application to buy tickets in groups as large as 80, according to Disney.
Talking to the New York Times, Oliver Luckett, senior vice president and general manager of DigiSynd, a Disney subsidiary that manages the entertainment giant’s presence on social networking platforms said “The whole idea is that no friend gets left behind,” said
Disney Tickets, which has been in development for months, works in conjunction with ticket-buying sites like Ticketeck who take the booking and process the ticket.
Disney claims that Facebook, which is approaching 500 million users around the world, has become a crucial marketing tool for entertainment companies. Disney alone operates hundreds of promotional pages on the site for its various products – motion pictures, theme park attractions, consumer products, television shows – that cumulatively reach tens of millions of people.
Dan Rose, the site’s vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook told the New York Times “What Disney is doing moves beyond just creating awareness to using the platform to acquire customers directly. This is the first time that a movie studio has tried this, which we think makes a lot of sense because movie going is one of those activities that is inherently social.”
