Friday, February 04, 2005

Movie marketing

Movie marketing

I found this article to actually be a really long explanation of why I think Marketing as an industry is so terribly backwards. To suggest that not only are there standard ways to sell the enitre spectrum of films but that appealing to the largest audience necessary is the most effective tactic is extremely irritating to me. And when it's institutionalized as an industry, the professionals that take on the resposibilities of marketers are the first to forget to separate the viability of a product with their desire to sell it. TO EVERYONE.

This may be an extremely abstract tirade, so I'll cut to the chase. Marketing is a necessary and naturally creative function. But it needs to come from the people who make the film and not people who have done it before. This, is a complicated issue, and of course it's not that black and white, but that's the basis of my argument.

As shown here by the marketers who were confounded by the difficulty of reaching everyone with a limited trailer. Maybe they should take the more natural stance that maybe this isn't a movie that everyone should be watching.

The product, ultimately, is everything. You may get people to watch something they wouldn't have otherwise gotten to watch with some TV commercial, but a lot of the time, you're lying to them and getting them to watch something they don't WANT to watch. Granted this isn't always the case, and the communication is important, but let's not forget that.

I did think the part about distributing "red band" trailers on line was interesting. And the new convergence of marketing materials coming from a single source thanks to technological affordances. That may be reason enough to bring all the creative marketing back to the film's creative team, since it's not really that damn hard.

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