Can Robots Create Better Movie Trailers?
It takes just a few seconds for a movie or series trailer to grab you — or to lose you.
Netflix and other content studios know this. It’s the reason why those micro-previews begin to autoplay when you hover your mouse over a title on menu screens for Netflix, Hulu or Amazon’s Prime Video. Those few seconds — critical to the studios — can convey so much. They can encapsulate the emotional content of a film, a bit of the story arch perhaps, a glimpse of the characters and more. That is, if they’re done right.
Send a text and you could miss one: Fox Sports is rolling out, new 6-second television commercials for the start of the NFL season. The move to exceptionally short ad spots comes after the network saw a dip in viewership last season, to 16.5 million, from 17.9 million the season before. But the move is about much more than ratings, says the Smith School's Michel Wedel. 
Say you're a hotel manager trying to decide whether to build a pool: Will the additional reservations you bring in from that amenity offset the cost of construction and maintenance? Or say you offer free bottled water to all guests. If you stopped doing so, would you save money in the long run? New research from the Smith School offers some answers to these questions. 