Film Marketing

Film Marketing
The Relationship Between Audiences and Producers 

Since the 1920’s film producers have been coming up with innovative ways to get the audience to see their movies, to do this they have to successfully market their film. It is very important for film producers to form a relationship with their audience because by finding ways to connect with them the easier it will be to target films towards them and make the most money as possible for the film. In this post I will be discussing how producers find their audiences and how they build relationships with them.

When a producer is starting to find their audience they will start by researching  into what people want to see. They are able to obtain this data a multitude of different ways; the most successful and popular way being focus groups. This is where the producer will get a large group of people and ask them questions about themselves and what they would like to see, and sometimes show them parts of the film to get feedback and pointers on. This type of research is very popular in the film industry as it will show you roughly how the film will play to a varied audience and the feedback could help you make the film better and appeal to a wider audience. Producers could also do something called market research. This is where they will look at the current market to see how other films are doing and try to use similar techniques of popular films. To gather data via current markets producers could look at box office figures to work out what are popular trends.

District 9

The producers of the film ‘District 9’ (2009) came up with a very innovative way to form a relationship with the public. They used very public advertisements placed on billboards and bus shelters asking the public to report any non-human activity to a phone number at the bottom of the advert. When people called this number they would get a recorded message asking them to leave a message about the sighting, some of these messages would be posted on the films official Facebook page, leading to on-line conversation and eventually going viral throughout the whole world.

The amount of people that called the fake number would let the producers know the potential audience before the film was even released. The mysteriousness of the campaign in the general public would also lead to people from the target audience researching into the film. Although the advertising campaign was wildly successful the film makers would also have used other ways of advertising along-side this, for example the cast and crew for the film would have done interviews with the press to help gain publicity for the film gather more potential audience.

The campaign was very innovative although a similar idea was utilised in the marketing campaign for the 1984 film Ghostbusters, where a phone number was placed on a fake TV infomercial which was shown in the US. When people called the number they reached a recorded message from the actors in the film telling the caller they were currently busy catching ghosts and to call back later. The phone number reportedly rang non-stop around the clock for the initial run of the film.

District 9 grossed $37,354,308 in it’s first weekend. This shows us that the marketing for the film was successful as it drew a huge audience in and made a lot of money for an independent feature film on its opening weekend,