Film marketing & Audience targeting

Film marketing & Audience targeting

• 1.
  Film Marketing & Audience Targeting
• 2.
  Audience targeting  Asyou may have learnt, before even making the film the company will put time into assuring they have identified the target audience for the film. During todays session I will be focusing on these topics:  How the audience was targeted for TWO films of recent memory  How the target audience was considered during these films production/post/advertising  17 essential ways marketing is used in todays movies.
• 3.
  How many waysto advertise a film can you think of right now? Lets list them.
• 4.
  Marketing Techniques used: Press Junket (Interviews on TV, With the film poster in the background)  Publicity blitz (Traditional advertising such as posters, trailers, TV spots, Magazine ads, Newspaper ads, newspaper promotions etc)  Viral Videos & campaigns (We will discuss these later)  Product tie-ins and corporate partnerships (such as on food packaging,  Publicity stunts. (orchestrated media event where someone does something incredibly silly, dangerous or spectacular to draw further attention to the opening of the movie)
• 5.
  How were thespecific Audiences targeted for two films?
• 6.
  Transformers 4  Thisfilm has an interesting Target audience because it has a core fanbase before its been even released. You have normal people who have seen the previous 3 films (like many of you perhaps). And then you have a large, worldwide fan-base community.  Taken from http://www.the-numbers.com/, This franchise has taken $3,250,731,968 in worldwide boxoffice at this current moment. Which brings with it a huge budget for production and therefore advertising  This gives the film the power to be advertised based on the films name, and is known by most people and highly regarded by a loyal, highly Vocal fan-base (even with their own conventions etc)
• 7.
  What Main techniqueswere used to reach target audience?  Film trailers included nods to Transformers lore for older fans of the franchise, this was essentially to entice the main fanbase for the franchise, because of a general negative reaction to these films within these people  Trailers, Press Junket (Mark Wahlberg), Publicity blitz, TV Spots, Viral Videos & campaigns, Product tie-ins and corporate partnerships and Publicity stunts via Social media. And Most importantly for this franchise, the TOY LINE.  In essence, a well established franchise with little need for advertising, but with the budget to utilise it all regardless.
• 8.
  And now forsomething completely different… TF4 Eventually created over 30 separate TV spots with mostly the same footage, but occasionally new shots. Here is a 16 second one.
• 9.
  Who has seenCloverfield? What do you know about this film? Any Ideas about how they approached Advertising the film?
• 10.
  Cloverfield  New franchise.Small budget. In some senses, production team slightly less sure of target audience. This meant a reliance on a different and unusual technique to drum up interest  Believe it or not this website was actually used in the viral marketing campaign for Cloverfield.  http://slusho.jp/  As you can see, they went to a lot of effort to provide a cryptic backstory. JJ Abrams wasn’t Director, but he was heavily involved. Watch this video if you have time. (JJ abrams mystery box) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpjVgF5JDq8  Essentially the films target audience was almost entirely internet based, word of mouth, with little to go on in terms of story, style or plot. Until the first trailer.
• 11.
  Cloverfield Trailer
• 12.
  What does ittell you about the film? What feeling does it provoke? How does it sell the film?
• 13.
  Techniques used totarget their audience, The CURIOUS!  Unique, groundbreaking way to create a target audience from scratch with little or no direct advertising about the film.  Deflection, Fake websites to link to the conspiracy behind the film such as Slusho, 1-18-08.com,  Creating confusion, The producers of Cloverfield, tricked the audience and helped keep them interested by constantly changing the name, for instance; 1-18-08 (USA) Slusho (USA) etc  Social media, The producers created MySpace profiles for some of the characters. These profiles contained; pictures, videos, blogs, etc. This created lots of hype and confused possible viewers, as it made them question if the characters were real people
• 14.
  17 TIPS tomarketing online  I found an excellent site for information on this I will link for you, http://www.ventureharbour.com/ultimate-guide-marketing-films-tv- shows-online/ These include:  #1 Do Something Remarkable – The Publicity Stunt  #6 Involve your audience in the making of the film  #8 Create a visually compelling & functional sub-site  #9 Make your Facebook Page Interactive  #11 Auction props used in the film or TV show  #12 Use social competitions & quizzes  #13 Using Celebrity & Brand Partnerships
• 15.
  Inspiration before thetask.
• 16.
  Task for therest of todays session  You will be divided up into groups of 2/3  You will be given the story-cubes to quickly create a generic Film Idea  Throw the dice, write down the 9 images, use the images to write a film premise. A premise is a short, one to three sentence statement, which captures the essential elements of the films screenplay.  You will then in your groups attempt to define the target audience.  You will then produce on paper ideas for a marketing campaign using all or some of the techniques discussed! Be as detailed as possible, and assign job roles within your group!  Above All, Have Fun!  If we have time at the end, we can quickly present your ideas to the whole group!