“Asses the importance of marketing in the media area you
have studied.”
Marketing
in film is the most important leading factor when it comes to its
release. If the marketing was bad, the movie will bomb even if it’s good. Just
because a few people like the movie and really enjoy it, if people don’t want
to watch your movie beforehand you are not going to turn up a profit or be
successful. When looking for a movie to watch, I do not look for one that I’ve
never heard before, but one that “was supposed to be good” that I may
have heard people talk about.
For
example, the movie “Ugly Dolls” had an abysmal marketing campaign. Their entire
hook was that the voice actors for the animated films were celebrities, other
than that they put in little effort. The bland posters, bad trailers, and bad
overall message led to the movie not making any money; even after being carried
by a large partnership between STX Entertainment and Alibaba. On the other
hand, Guardians of the Galaxy V2 had a near-perfect marketing
execution. According to Filmmaker Marcus Taylor, “Timing is incredibly
important – you must build up as much hype in the short space of time leading
up to and around the launch as possible.” and Guardians of the
Galaxy V2 did just that with visually appealing posters and a
plethora of cross-promotions like custom Dairy Queen cups,
or Geico using the character Groot in their ads. The timing
with the marketing and their teaser trailer to hype fans up was impeccable,
being short enough for people to speculate what will happen in the new film but
long enough for people to remember it when it finally came to theaters. The
movie was a wondrous success.
Another
big part of marketing is the research that goes into it. You must know your
audience better than they know themselves. Once a film is usually completed for
the first-time t is screened to a test audience of varied ages,
ethnicities, genders, and more. Film studios are eager to set up these
screenings as much as possible see who their movie will appeal too. This type
of research would be popular for big-budget films such as “The Lego Movie 2”
where the first movie may have been a big hit, but it was too divided from adult
and kids fans. After advertising on kids toys and ads for adults like furniture
and cars the movie decided to pursue a more kid-friendly route than the
original. According to its box office, it did quite worse than its predecessor;
this may have been because it was aimed too much at kids. A
successful example is “Black Panther”. Black Panther had its first big
marketing ploy after having its début trailer at a big NBA game. Not
only was this good because of how many people were there, but it also centralized
on their type of audience. Another way to reach their audience was through
their soundtrack, focusing on artists that their demographic would listen too
on their own time. Black Panther then became the most successful superhero
movie based off of statistics in 2018- something it couldn’t have
done without marketing.
Films that
don’t abuse marketing to the fullest extent are just hurting themselves.
Alan McGlade says that “marketing is so important to a film, that a
company will pay one dollar for marketing for every two dollars spent to make
the actual film." Companies want people to watch their movies,
and without any good marketing strategies, it will never become a success.
