Exclusive Q&A Interview: Movie Marketing (Part 3)
Continuing this week’s look at the business of movie marketing: For Day 1, go here. For Day 2, go here.
We are fortunate to have an insider’s take on the subject. Our expert, who prefers to remain anonymous, has worked in marketing for one of the big movie studios for 7 years, first involved with specialty /indie-films, then moving up to the studio’s major motion picture division. Today we consider genres and look at the value of a strong story concept in terms of marketing strategies.
Q: What is the easiest genre to market? Hardest?
A: Every film genre presents different marketing challenges. You are speaking to one audience when marketing a romantic comedy, and a completely different audience when marketing an action adventure. The most important part of a marketing teams job is to decide who the audience is for a specific film, then figure out the best way to reach them. Take for example a romantic comedy. We generally would spend very little to reach a male audience when marketing this genre. We would push some advertising in the direction of the male audience to make them aware that our film exists, but our real focus would be on women. We would concentrate our efforts towards reaching women of all ages, communicating to them that this is a great “date movie”, in hopes that they would in turn convince their dates/boyfriends/husbands to see them film. As long as butts get in seats (doesn’t matter how), we’ve done our job.
This raises the subject of cross-genre movies. If a movie is a straight-ahead rom-com, or drama, or an action movie, it’s relatively easy for the studio to determine who the movie’s target audience is, which in turn drives nearly every other marketing decision. But cross-genre movies (action-comedy, drama-comedy) are tougher to pull off: Where to put the emphasis? What audience to focus on?
Here are two good examples of cross-genre movies, one that connected with audiences, the other not so much. Zombieland is a horror-comedy. Here is one of the movie’s trailers:
From the very first images, it emphasizes the movie’s comedy. And that’s been really helpful with their box office results:
Last weekend’s №1 movie, “Zombieland,” enjoyed a relatively modest decline, down only 39% to $15 million. It appears that the Sony Pictures release is playing more like a comedy, as most horror movies decline more than 50%.
In Zombieland, the comedy and horror mesh together really well, so Sony could market the hell out of the comedy and widen the audience — the movie has done nearly $50M at the box office in just 2 weeks.
On the other hand is the movie Funny People. Here’s the premise:
When seasoned comedian George Simmons learns of his terminal, inoperable health condition, his desire to form a genuine friendship cause him to take a relatively green performer under his wing as his opening act.
Do you pitch it as a drama-comedy or a comedy-drama? Two different audiences. Here’s one of the movie’s trailers:
Play it funny upfront in the trailer, then drama midway through it, then interweave both on the back end. But the movie’s box office results are considered a disappointment: $51M with a prod budget of $75M — and I think in large part because the comedy and the drama did mesh together very well — and that shows in the trailer.
Q: How important is a strong story concept / high concept to a marketing campaign?
A: I think strong story concepts are incredibly important to a marketing campaign. It’s always easier to sell a movie when it’s got a great storyline behind it, because the story speaks for itself. It is possible to sell a film with a weak story line (obviously we’ve seen this happen), but it means the marketing team has to convince the audience the film is something that it’s not in order to get them into the theater. This is where word of mouth comes into play. If a films story line is weak, the general public will be quick to let others know. Even if a film with a weak story line opens to a decent box office (because the marketing campaign successfully convinced them it was something it’s not), it will fizzle very quickly due to poor word of mouth.
And again with the prime takeaway from this series: If you write a script with a strong story concept, you make the script that much more marketable — and therefore that much easier for a buyer to say “Yes!”
In tomorrow’s post, we look at the relative value of A-list stars versus story concept, and the unique challenges that come with marketing a specialty / indie-type film.
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