Vote On OSCAR Movie Trailers On Your Mobile Phone

What would Norma Desmond make of the mobile revolution?

In the Hollywood classic Sunset Boulevard, when silent-film star Norma Desmond is told she "used to be big," and she famously retorts: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small."

Now even the trailers are getting pint sized.

Just in time for this Sunday's OSCAR broadcast, Evanston, Ill.-based Mimieo is enabling movie fans to watch and vote on movie trailers for OSCAR-nominated films using iPhone, Facebook and the website VoteOscarsAds.com.

Following each movie clip, participants will be asked whether they thought the trailer was entertaining, and whether the ad made them more or less likely to go see the film. Polling responses will then be used to create real-time movie rankings on the www.VoteOscarsAds.com website.

Mimieo will also be conducting research on the commercials televised during the broadcast of the Academy Awards. With spending at an estimated $1.6 million for each 30-seconds of commercial time, the cost nearly rivals the February 3rd Super Bowl ads. Companies including General Motors, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, J.C. Penny, Coca-Cola, and MasterCard are each expected to participate. To gauge advertising effectiveness, Mimieo will collect polling results on Oscar night, as well as the throughout the following week.

All very cool. But if you have the technology to do all of this, why not also enable users to vote for OSCAR recipients, and see how it squares with the actual winners?

It seems like consumers would care more about registering their opinion on that than on which film trailers - which really don't have anything to do with the quality of the actual film - they like best.

A missed opportunity, but one that there's still time to mitigate.

To paraphrase Norma Desmond again, mobile's ready for its close-up.

Why not use it to  its fullest extent?

Read more about the Mimieo initiative, here.

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