How Important Is Film Marketing in Attracting an Audience? Essay

How important is Film Marketing in Attracting an Audience?
Marketing can be seen as three distinct areas: advertising, publicity and promotional deals worked out with other companies. Marketing is of high importance in the distribution process, including decisions about what cinemas and where and release timing of a film. The success or failure of the marketing campaign of a film will have a huge influence on the profitability of the film.
The key elements of any film marketing campaign includes: posters, the unique selling point of a poster promises a unique film and may appear special to the viewer, most viewers need to be presented with a film that seems different from the others they have seen before, something new and exciting and this helps to real them in to watch the film, and ultimately this aids the profit of the film all because of the poster.
Trailers are also a huge part of marketing, and these need to present a number of key elements to a potential audience. The genre of the film has to be apparent and this may be shown through key scenes, dialogue, and iconography or sound elements. The key elements of the narrative also have to be included, but obviously not enough to give away the surprises within the narrative. If the film is star driven then the viewer will expect to see sequences including well known stars. As it is with posters the trailer must present itself as unique to sell to its audience.
Media Advertising is another way films are advertised to wider audiences, such as the scaling down of posters so they can appear in magazines and newspapers, and scaled up versions to be plastered across the side of busses, this provides a moving advertisement to be seen by thousands of people a day.
The internet is a more modern and complicated marketing tool, creating fan sites and has been an amazing tool for promoting a film. Like with the fan sites for James Cameron’s, Avatar, Pandorapedia was a website launched that gave extensive detail...