Film Marketing (and it's evolution)

Some Recent History on Movie Marketing:

The way movies are marketed is changing. Four years ago movies spent about 70% of the film budget amount of advertising. Recently this percentage and spending in marketing in general. Today, production costs are a fraction of the marketing budgets. The recent trend of low-budget horror and thriller films are a great example: The Purge, Insidious 1 & 2, Dark Skies, Sinister, Skyline, You’re Next, etc.  All of them had production budgets under $5 million dollars, and marketing budgets over $20 million. Subsequently you have probably seen these terrible movies way "over-hyped." While the budget doesn't apply to my production it does show the importance of marketing in film in general.

The Current Flaw in Movie Marketing:

The major flaw in current marketing is producers inability to target their target audience. In the past many movies were produced for mass and general audiences.  However, the future of the movie business lies in niche markets - not in generalized mass appeal. Audiences are growing numb to homogenized movie marketing and trailers. Budgets for niche films (as in anything besides franchises such as Batman, Avengers, etc.) are rapidly dropping as the economy fails. In this case it is becoming harder and harder to justify funding ineffective marketing such as T.V. commercials.

The next large shift in the film industry will come about when marketing companies are able to effectively and efficiently match content with the perfect consumer - like companies such as Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon prime are spearheading. To get ahead in the film marketing world it would be helpful to have a background in mathematics and/or computer science to target marketing towards niche consumers. The future is data, and he (or she) who writes the algorithm holds the keys.

The Bottom Line:

Soon everyone in the U.S. will have access to any media at anytime, anywhere, at the click of a button. New content will have to now compete with other new content and old content.  In this future, being new, fresh, original, and having a strong, unique voice will be more important than ever. Having a hackneyed "marketing hook" that can "open a weekend" (a la The Purge or The Devil Inside) will eventually become irrelevant.  The era of regurgitated clichés, or as they're more commonly known, "event movies," is almost over.  The new digital distribution revolution will become the problem of a whole new generation of filmmakers, who can continue to make quality niche content and organically grow their audience over time.


I really enjoyed reading this and it helped me think about my target audience a lot. For example, who is may audience? Probably young adults, late teens and adults. What about distribution? Black Mirror for example is aired on BBC but many watch it through Netflix so I would probably do a short special agreement with Netflix as they do future a few short films. For the website I'll appeal to my age group by maintaing clean lines and picture etc.

That's all for today friends!