There are various ways in which the film distributor can advertise and promote films. The biggest technique is getting people talking about the film, by building a hype about the film and thus getting people talking and sharing the film. This is essentially free advertising however people need to know about the film to start talking about it. A trailer is a great way to advertise the film, it allows the audience to see what kind of film it is, who is starring in the film and a small part of the narrative. Trailers have to be perfect to attract audience though as this is going to be the first actual footage of the film that people are going to see, and as everyone knows first impressions are key and can make or break a film. Posters and general web advertising is another way of getting people to know and talk about the film. An eye catching poster or banner on a website will make people do further research on whatever it is you're promoting. Then you have the cinema ads and just general banners like across the sides of buses. Again many people around cities like London will see the banners and do further research about the film. The Woman In Black Is a great example of marketing done right. They promoted their main star (Daniel Radcliffe) more than the actual film to attract the millions of Harry Potter fans. Being Radcliffe's first film away from the Harry Potter world he whole heartedly done everything in his power to promote the film, setting up YouTube accounts with exclusive interviews and running competitions to win signed merchandise from the cast. With the star giving updates on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook it reached out to the targeted audience which was the teenage Harry Potter fans. Radcliffe also done every TV, radio and website interview humanly possible to again promote the film. Daniel Radcliffe is the biggest reason as to way the film was so successful and that is just one aspect of the marketing campaign, they had posters everywhere in newspapers, the woman in black marketing campaign was huge but so was the film. With a production budget of 17 million dollars it made over 20 million dollars in the opening weekend and grossed over 54 million dollars world wide.Audience research will first be done to establish a target audience, this will be done with focus groups surveys and questionnaires. Once getting the results that will allow the film distributor to establish a target audience then can then create a marketing campaign tailored to that certain film. The marketing campaign would be different for say 13-19 year old females than 50-60 year old males. The teenage marketing campaign would mostly be online and advertised through social networking sites where as the 50-60 year old marketing campaign would be more paper based like posters and banners. The teenage marketing campaign would also be bigger as there is a bigger target audience to attract and more money to be made than the other example. Without audience research they could put all their resources into the wrong audience and this could be catastrophic for the success of the film. Audience research is again key to a films success. Another example of a good set of audience research and marketing campaign is Paranormal Activity made on the miniscule budget of £12,000 it grossed over 200 million dollars worldwide and became one of the biggest horror film franchise across the planet. Obviously not having much of a budget it was essential to attract the right audience as they could only do this once. Banners and small internet ads were used to attract as many people as possible and of course it was a huge success.
As you can see from the poster it is very simple with a shot from the film not an especially made photo shoot which is normally done for film posters. Very basic colour and looks like it was done on photo shop. Although being very simple they needed to show people that their film was good and so have a review at the top of their poster allowing people to see what people think of the film. Although you may not notice it the text 'Don't See It Alone' is actually a very clever piece of advertising. Making people think that this film is very scary they warn people to not watch it alone, therefore people that want to watch the film will bring alone a partner of friend to watch the film with them thus generating more income to the film makers. As said before with such a small budget they needed to be very smart with the advertising of the film and they obviously done this very well.
Annotated YouTube Video
This annotated video shows what I took inspiration from to create my horror poster and my magazine cover, and my finished trailer.
