Rentrak

Rentrak was a client of ours at our agency Elvis & Bonaparte, back in the day when people rented DVD movies from physical stores like Blockbuster (remember that? probably not.). Small, stand-alone video rental shops couldn't compete with these big chains. Buying the inventory was just too costly and when a title became less popular, its resale value plummeted. So Rentrak offered a much cheaper stocking solution to all these independent retailers; they could lease their inventory of movies from them at much lower than "wholesale" and remain competitive with the giants like the aptly named Blockbuster. They innovated a revenue model called Pay-Per-Transaction (PPT) in which the retailer would share some of the revenue from each customer revenue with Rentrak. It was win-win. Retailers could break even faster and start making a profit. And it helped Rentrak grow and thrive throughout this era...until DVD rentals went bust in the age of streaming. But it continued into the age of streaming as studios needed to lease rights to movies rather than buy them outright, which Rentrak had also been doing since 1977.

Members of our creative team that developed this campaign, besides me and my partner, Cheryl Vandemore, were Dave Helfrey, Stacy Bolt, James Cheung, Oscar Reza, We had so much fun on this account. While many people may think B2B advertising should be dry, getting right to the sales message, we realized that we were talking to ordinary people; people who also appreciated being made to smile. I love B2B advertising. The nerdier the better.

Our advertising solution for Rentrak's main proposition to the video rental retailers was a series of trade ads and direct mailers.We developed a series of parodies of vintage movie posters as direct mailers and trade ads to make Rentrak's clients smile with nerdy appreciation. Not only that, but there was the even better gratification of seeing how these creative solutions resulted in faster growth for Rentrak.

Remember those fold-in back pages from Mad Magazine? We did one as a DM to graphically show how Rentrak's PPT made reaching your profit margin faster works.

And a DM that gently mocked the old employee-in-a-costume-flagging-customers-in tactic with a better promotional solution offered by Rentrak; having your store on a geo-referenced online directory. This was before Google, obviously. And before the mass-extinction of video rental stores. Sigh.

And, of course, traditional trade ads in the industry.

 

 

 

We also did ads and DMs to promote other B2B services, like inventory management, Streamlined Solutions, and online promotion support for video-rental customers of their clients.

 

And this in-store poster promoting another service that Rentrak's clients could offer their customers.

 

We wanted to take a fresh approach to the traditional testimonial ad taking Rentrak's most successful clients and do parodies of classic movie posters featuring them. They all came to the photo shoots very enthusiastic. One, Phil Yee, got so into it he insisted on doing his own Jackie Chan stunts.