Promotional Strategies

Posters/Print Based:

Posters are one of the most commonly used promotional strategies when it comes to advertising films. You find them on bus stops, on buses, in cinemas, on billboards, in malls, and seems to be the basic marketing strategy that most films will begin with when starting their advertising campaign. Despite this being the obvious option to go for when it comes to promotional strategies, I feel that it's necessary since it seems proven to work. I don't think every film that comes out at the moment would still be making posters if they didn't work. Below are some examples of print based/poster advertising for films, that I think were slightly more interesting and effective than the rest:

What I like about this poster is that it advertises the film quite openly, but it has a viral twist. That's something that I'd like to work with when it comes to creating my advertising campaign for my urban exploring film.

This is a slightly better example of using a bus for advertising a film. It doesn't just apply the strip of poster that quite a lot of movies do, but in fact takes over the whole bus. This is a lot more effective I feel, and definitely makes you look twice.

Not a film poster (however, a lot of games seem like films nowadays!), but I couldn't leave out this great example of advertising. Grand Theft Auto: 4 had a very large marketing campaign, that literally left buildings with huge posters of characters from the game on their walls.

Online Presence:

I think another vital aspect of advertising a film nowadays is to have a strong online presence. By having a website, that can include interactivity, trailers, games etc, can add to how much interest your film gets. It also allows people who are wishing to find out more about your film a place to get such information. Another way to use an online presence for marketing movies is to use is a viral marketing strategy. 

For an example of a fantastic online presence, I want to document The Dark Knight viral campaign. Combining an online presence with flash mobs in various cities in the US, it allowed for a massive volume of views to the websites.

The above images are screenshots from a number of websites created for the release of The Dark Knight. They are meant to come across as if the Joker has created them and then ties in certain aspects of the websites design and information into flash mobs in cities around the States. This really gives the movie and the advertising campaign some depth, and makes it very real to the viewer, which is what any movie fan wants, surely! This viral marketing campaign is one of the best I've seen in a long time and used so many different types of promotional strategy, from posters, street art, and even getting their logo on a Formula One car. It all paid off however with The Dark Knight grossing $238.6 million in the first week and was the biggest gross in the first week in motion picture history.

Viral/Guerilla Marketing:

Viral/guerilla marketing is probably one of my favourite types of promotional strategies. For me, it shows itself as one of the most creative aspects of advertising, since it takes an element from the film and then applies it to real life, and hacks people's environments. As shown above, I've decided to use the Blair Witch Project which based on it's small budget, grossed $248 million worldwide, helped along by it's guerilla/viral marketing campaign. The campaign surrounding the movie has been named as one of the most successful guerilla advertising campaigns of all time.

Using missing posters, all directed back to a fictional website, it had a lot of people fooled as to whether the film was actual documented events. Despite a lot of speculation, this still helped add to the suspense and fear generated by the film, which ultimately helped the success of the film reach the level it did. It was a very simple operation that ultimately made the movie the hit it is today.