By Reid Rosefelt
I’ve been a film publicist for 35 years and have worked on hundreds of movies. Whether a film ended up grossing a hundred thousand or a hundred million, my approach has always been essentially the same.
1) Be Consistent With Positioning
The most important task for a marketer is to find a description of the film that accentuates its strengths, minimizes its weaknesses, and makes you want to see it. In the trade this is called “positioning.” The chosen positioning drives everything in a unified way–the press materials, the theatrical, digital or DIY release strategy, the publicity, the poster, the trailer, the website, the ads, and social media. As each film is unique, the journey to find the best positioning starts at zero every single time. It has been my experience that films that have good positioning executed in a unified way by creative professionals will do better than ones that don’t. Of course, a small indie film with no stars doesn’t have the same potential as “World War Z.” Success is relative–good positioning will lift a film up and bad positioning will drag it down, and sometimes a little bit of lift can be all it takes to make a huge difference in a film’s life.
2) Be Clear About Your Goals
Successful film marketing involves setting a clear goal: at a festival, this usually means getting a deal; at the time of release it usually means getting people to the theatres or VOD or imprinting an awareness of the film for future viewings on other platforms. There are numerous goals, like promoting a crowdfunding campaign, but the marketers need to be clear about what those goals are, and once that’s decided, they should never do anything that doesn’t serve that goal.
3) Don’t Follow the Pack
A film marketer should never be ruled by what everybody else does. To copy others isn’t logical, as most independent films fail. Certainly study the techniques of successful marketers, but don’t take your direction from the crowd.
4) Watch the Clock (and Your Wallet)
The film marketer must never forget that money and time is always finite, no matter how much money or time you have. Successful film marketers allocate more time to things that have been proven to create more awareness for a film than things that they have found don’t work, or haven’t yet been proven yet.
The second part of this article continues on Reid Rosefelt’s Site, Here.
Reid Rosefelt blogs and coaches filmmakers & artists about how to market their films using social media, and lectures frequently on the topic. His credits as a film publicist include “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and “Precious.”
His blog is reidrosefelt.com and his Pinterest Page “Social Media for Filmmakers” was named first on IndieWire’s list of “10 Pinterest Boards Filmmakers Should be Following.”
