Evaluation question 2: How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary texts?

A film distributor’s job is to market and distribute the film worldwide, whether this be by DVD’s, online or in cinemas. Obviously their goal is to reach out to the largest audience possible, so they will often use as many media platforms as possible. Some of these platforms include:

TV and cinema ads; short-full length trailers can be played in between shows on TV or before another film at the cinema, each have their own benefits. TV ads can be seen by an audience of million if placed on the right channel at the right time, however with the rise of services such as Sky Plus which allows the audience to record programmes, it also gives them the opportunity to skip over these adverts. Cinema adverts usually have a smaller audience however if they are placed before a film of the same genre they can directly target the films target audience.

Outdoor ads; these include billboards, posters, ads on the side of busses etc. These can also be seen by a large audience but it is not dependant on timing like TV and cinema ads.

Online ads; these have the potential to be huge or ‘viral’. They are a lot cheaper to produce than other forms of advertisement, reach to just a large if not larger audience and can be interactive (which audiences love).

The way a film is marketed is dependent on the audiences demographics. This is why audience research is incredibly important for a distributor to perform. If you don’t know much about your target audience, you may potentially be wasting a lot of money. For example, if you primary audience is those above the age of 60 and you put all of you advertisement online, it is unlikely to be seen by them. It is important to find out what type of media your target audience consumes the most so you can learn where to focus your advertisements.

For an example of a successful advertisement campaign, look at my previous work regarding The Woman in Black.

It is essential for a films advertisement campaign to have a theme which continues throughout all advertisement platforms such as a song/sound, text style, colour theme or image etc. so that it can be easily recognisable.

Our marketing campaign:

We decided on giving our film an age certificate of 15. Whilst our target audience is in the 17 to 25 age bracket, the film does not contain enough gore, extremely strong language and/or scenes of a sexual nature to warrant it having an 18 certificate.

Our trailer and my poster have two main similarities, them being the tagline and the mannequin itself. The tagline ‘They are watching’ is a quote pulled from the trailer ‘They were always there waiting, watching’. I chose this line in particular because the mannequin is looming over my model ominously, watching him. I, of course, could not have created the poster without the mannequin as they are the key aspect of the film. Another similarity is the colour scheme. Red lighting is used a lot during the trailer in the action scenes as red is synonymous with the horror genre as it connotes blood. 

If a film manages to get featured on the front cover of a magazine then is will greatly improve it’s promotion. The audience sees it as if it’s being promoted by the magazine, and if they are avid readers of the magazine they may be suggested to go and see it just because the magazine recommends it. This would of course still work if the film is just mentioned on the inside of a magazine, but the front cover is likely to be seen by a lot of passers-by, even if they don’t buy it. My cover relates to our trailer and my poster because of the setting (woods being heavily prevalent in the trailer) and the colour scheme (white text used on the trailer with a little red thrown in).