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| | | | | | | | | | | | | Marketing a Film
In the business of show business, making good movies is only half of the battle. The other half belongs to the marketing department and the individuals who have the thankless job of selling the product to the public.
Marketing a film is about finding your audience, literally. Where are they? What is their movie-going behavior? What do they respond to?
It is easy to see how the distribution and marketing of a film are so closely tied together. Movies that are released wide will market wide, and this is conversely true as well. A wider marketing net will catch more fish, hence, more theatres.
With "Stolen Summer" rolling out into theatres soon, the Miramax marketing machine is working hard to create a marketing push for a, relatively speaking, small film.
Marketing begins early. All the studios have marketing departments in-house, but there are independent vendors that do help with pieces of this process. The first job of a marketing team is to decide who the audience is for your film. Teenage boys? Women over the age of 40? Little Kids? All three?
Once the target audience is established, the art department will come up with a one-sheet. A one-sheet is the poster that contains a graphic, picture, or image that people will respond to in some way that will hopefully incite them to see the film.
Before there were infinite ways to have a marketing message reach its target audience, one-sheets were a key piece of the puzzle. These days, the Internet, television ads, and movie trailers can flood target audiences with information. Web sites in particular have become an effective tool for digging deeper into the world of the film, and offering actual entertainment value, while getting the user excited for the movie itself.
But once the message is clear, the poster, the trailer, and the tag lines are all created to generate a tangible image for a film. It is also not uncommon for a film to have a different sensibility in two co-existing campaigns. Take "Jerry Maguire." During football Sundays, a commercial would come on television, showing Tom Cruise high-fiving Cuba Gooding Jr., and then Cuba doing his famous end-zone dance. Two nights later, another ad would come on TV, this time during network television primetime, showing Tom telling Renee Zelwegger that he completes her.
Granted, this is Tom Cruise, and there are very few actors who are appealing across so many demographics. But the message was clear: Guys, come watch if you like football. Girls, come because you like Tom.
Remember "Who is Keyser Soze?" It was a poster that was as intriguing as it was mysterious, and audiences flocked to see "Usual Suspects" to find out.
Or "Godzilla." Remember, no look at the monster unless you pay your nine bucks. But, "size does matter," essentially guaranteeing the audience that everything about this movie, the lizard, the sound, the screen, is big. And so were the box office receipts.
Take the American Pie movies. Both campaigns promised teenage, high school fun, equip with bare breasts, drinking, and a lot of sex talk. The high school boys went, and so did the high school girls, and so did a lot of people who loved that image of the pie on every poster on every bus stop.
Some films are harder to market, to find that hook that will ultimately lure audiences. "Out of Sight," the Steven Soderbergh thriller with Clooney and Lopez is an example of this. The movie was a critical success, but didn't totally hit with audiences, and this is in part due to a lost marketing message. Audiences didn't know what they were going to see.
Of course, some movies are easier to market than others. And as is often the case in Hollywood, the greatest marketing tool for a movie is your talent. Studios work hard to get their stars' faces on morning and late night television, and to all-day press junkets where anyone with a press pass gets 15 minutes with the stars to ask about the experience of making this movie.
What is "Stolen Summer's" hook? Who is the audience? Time will tell.
But with any movie, word of mouth is what puts butts in the seats. And thanks to Pete, there is no substitute for a good film. | | | |
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