Knowing where your audience is

If you haven’t figured out that all your media is now multimedia, I’m here to help you.

In case you don’t know me or my interest areas, I have kind of an unhealthy fascination with movie marketing efforts. As part of that I often write about trailers and posters, two of the Big Three components of a traditional movie marketing campaign, the other being the official website.

Often, when writing about posters or trailers I’ll refer to how likely they are or were to appeal to the movie-going audience. After all, trailers play before movies and posters adorn the hallways that lead the audience from the lobby to Theater 36, which is on your right at mile-marker 52.

But the vast majority of posters I see aren’t printed on glossy paper and installed in a lighted display case. They’re JPG files. Likewise, I probably only see 15 trailers a year in theaters whereas I usually watch three a day as Quicktime or Flash video. And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one that sort of statement applies to, not by a long shot.

Even more important than that, though, is the reality that decisions regarding which posters to display in theaters and which trailers to attach to a particular film are made with the exhibitor’s hoped-for monetary reward in mind. So they’re going to select, in both cases, movies that are going to appeal to a broad audience to maximize the return-on-investment (the financial payoff of allocating X resource – in this case display space or running time – over time) for each of those limited resources. That is going to lead to decisions to advertise movies that are going to bring in the most return visitors since advertising niche product is going to diminish those returns.

But online display and distribution do away with many of those considerations about limited shelf space.

The reach of the marketing materials, then, is limited only by the search-friendliness of the content and the ability of a publicity team to get the word out.

It’s the responsibility of the marketing and publicity team to make sure that key audiences know about marketing materials so that they can decide to go see the movie themselves or, ideally, get their community activated to go see it en masse. Those agents working on niche-appeal movies cannot depend on the distributor getting the trailer in front of the audience since that decision in part lies on the shoulders of the exhibitor. And if your movie tackles some touch subject matter they’re not going to rush to put it on-screen when a trailer for the latest computer-animated feature from one of the big studios is likely to bring in more people next month.

So while tradition would have us believe that trailers and posters are things that experienced in the real, physical world, they’re largely not. And the percentage of the audience that will never see a particular movie’s trailer offline is only going to grow. That’s why it’s important that these materials not only appear online, but through a combination of search-optimization and coordinated outreach, are actually seen by the audience that’s going to find them most interesting and contribute to their success.