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Online audiences aren't just passionate; they're also a rich source of demographic data. Offline marketers are getting hip to new ways to use the data.

Producer Oren Jacob is currently in the process of finding online distribution for his feature-length documentary "Ready Set Bag," a festival favorite that explores the world of professional grocery baggers who compete to prove their prowess at the annual bagging competition in Las Vegas. In his day job capacity as CTO of Pixar, Jacob is intimately familiar with the advantages of working with a major studio and a massive advertising budget, but as an indie producer he's looking for ways to get around it. While he had several offers from distributors to release the film, "the length of time that a standard distributor requests all rights known to mankind was just so restrictive," Jacob said via phone. "If, for whatever reason, the release doesn't go as planned, or as well as you want to, you have no recourse. That meant that our film would succeed or fail on someone else's terms, and that didn't feel like the right thing to do with the film that you funded yourself." So Jacob and a host of other independent artists are turning to the mountains of data generated by online users to find when and where they should share their works.