The State of Theatrical Film Marketing

Stradella Road was pleased to once again co-produce the Variety Film Marketing Summit, which brings together industry leaders from both major and independent studios, as well as pioneering marketing and technology companies. The following is the second in a series highlighting key issues, strategies and opportunities that came to light amidst some very candid conversations.

The State of Theatrical Film Marketing. More choices. More voices. Longer—seemingly endless—campaigns. Marketing a major movie release these days requires navigating your way through a constantly moving, three-dimensional chessboard.

Content may still be King, but the King faces dire risk of losing his head without a wide-ranging, yet flexible, strategic plan. A distributor needs to be aware of the marketing implications of every stage of production, to develop a crystal-clear message that realistically takes into account pre-existing sentiments, to hold an open and candid discussion with consumers during the course of a campaign and to have a coherent plan to reach audiences across platforms.

With films today, the marketing job begins the day a project is announced. With every choice—from casting to costumes—likely to be picked over and judged, internet sentiment can turn against a film before the first frame is shot, a burden some campaigns never overcome. “You can’t announce your title, your date, the casting choices, without thinking of it as a piece of marketing,” says Oren Aviv, Fox’s President of Domestic Theatrical Marketing and Chief Marketing Officer. “Everything is marketing.”

With such a high level of scrutiny, the days of being able to put lipstick on a pig may well be over. For a movie to succeed, the product itself has to set the tone. “The DNA of a movie has the marketing arc in it,” says Josh Goldstein, Universal’s Marketing President. “A lot of the themes, the reasons you’ll connect to a movie exist in the most nascent stages, so part of the job is teasing that out and having those conversations at the beginning.”

For the film Horrible Bosses, “we branded it for comedy with a certain look. We developed each character so you understood them and their relationships with their bosses, selling the concept,”
explains Sue Kroll, President of Worldwide Marketing for Warner Brothers. For Bridemaids, on the other hand, Universal found the film’s essence in its unexpected, female-driven vulgarity, an off-color counterpoint to the hugely successful Hangover franchise.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, like many tentpole franchises, needed to overcome pre-existing negative consumer sentiment about prior installments in the series before its campaign could gain traction. “We were fighting perception about a cheesy franchise,” recalls Oren Aviv. “We only had one visual effects shot, seven and a half seconds long of Caesar turning his head and looking. But it was strategically dead on. Character driven, relationship driven, not monkey mayhem. We made that the center of the campaign.”

Once the core message is established, the question becomes how to best distribute it—choosing from a vast array of tools and platforms. The key is “looking at releasing info in the trailer and then releasing more online that is really customized,” says Ann Globe, Worldwide Head of Marketing and Consumer Products for Dreamworks Animation. “You can have three cuts, twenty cuts, but you have to find your way.”

Providing multiple versions of trailers and clips and behind-the-scenes pieces offers marketers a chance to show they are hearing consumers and reacting in real-time to the sentiments of target audiences. “Very rarely is it only one trailer; you tweak your message,” says Kroll.

Of course, a world of infinite seeming possibilities poses its own challenges. “The more we can explore a variety of platforms the greater the chance of people seeing our stuff. But it’s very expensive to be on all those platforms,” says Aviv. “It all comes down to your choices.” How are you going to put your bucket of money to best use? Is it PR vs. TV vs. Internet? Or can you find the elusive spot where each campaign element truly builds on the others?

When a major studio confidently puts it’s know-how and resources behind a creative campaign the results are clear: Consumers get excited enough about a release that they become its advocates, online and off. “It’s a very dynamic time in marketing,” says Josh Goldstein. “Our relationships with our customers are changing. The game and playbook is changing. But at the same time the human animal doesn’t change that much and what people respond to emotionally hasn’t changed that much.”