As I go back and look through my blog posts for the past couple of months I am noticing a trend in what I have had to say about the industry. Almost every post starts by me explaining how it is getting harder and harder to stand out in a market with so many products. This is fairly obvious in my post entitled “Too many Movies??” on October 13th about the challenges of finding your audience. Technology is becoming cheaper and easier to get a hold of. The Internet is unlimited. And people have a lot to say about a lot of issues. These three things are making movies easier to make and distribute. Because of this, we have a crowded market. And only the people that can use those tools to their advantage gets a good pay-off, not to mention a post about them on Tags Talk.
Check out sony.com to find the newest HD cameras for sale. These are great for a family to record their memories in Hi-Def, but that is not all they are being used for. A young filmmaker can go out and buy one of these and instantly improve her or his production quality in order to get noticed. The ad from Sony even says, “Shoot like a network cameraman.”
When I was in Singapore I was asked to be in a short film being produced by my friend’s friends. They needed a white guy to play an American and I fit the profile perfectly. The production company is bad alliteration productions. Check them out at www.bad-alliteration.com. Basically they are three guys that had a sony handycam with the dream of someday making full length feature films. They have the technology. Madhav bought a camera and some editing software. Their sound guy Siddesh has
bought all the equipment needed for a mini-recording studio. And their go to man for everything else, Varun, can get the rest. Madhav is a banker by day and by night he reads up on editing and shooting movies using the Internet and the occasional book as sources. Spend a little time on their website and watch some their short films and you’ll see that they definitely have something to say about what is going on in the world today. “Fuel for Jimmy,” is the movie I star in. It is about the west’s need for oil and disregard for human life.These guys are definitely on the far end of the spectrum. They don’t have a lot of money or time. But there are plenty of indie filmmakers out there that do. And they are doing what they do best, make films that offer a unique perspective on life. The only problem is there are so many on them, I can’t watch them all. I summed it up well in my September 12th post:
“…there is a crap load of indies out and none of them are breaking the clutter (hollywoodreporter.com) Even with box offices turning in record highs this summer, the spin-off companies of the major studios that invest in independent movies (you know, the ones with olive branches framed around "first place at blah blah blah" and stuff in the trailers), aren't getting recognized because everyone is doing it now. Hollywood reporter says that Fox Searchlight was one of the first to get into the indies and when people saw they were making money off things like Warner Independents' March of the Penguins everyone wanted a piece of the pie.”
The movie industry is starting to look more and more like the blogosphere. It takes very little money to set up a blog. Heck, use your public library and it's free. There are very few roadblocks, practically none. And the roadblocks for producing a movie are
being reduced as well. This means that more and more opinions will be shown in theaters everywhere. And it’s up to the marketing gurus of the world to lift up the best and most provocative.“Breaking the clutter,” probably the three biggest buzz words in the marketing handbook. But never have they been so true. Production companies are going to need to be creative in order to stand out. I posted about a few creative forms of advertising in the past month. The Nines had a make-a-trailer contest to introduce people to their film and add invested interest in its success. Leonardeo DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour used a cool widget with lots of fun features to spread the world about global warming. And some people like Michael Moore can just walk around and talk about his new movie to get noticed.
That is the issue in movie advertising right now. How do I get noticed? There is no longer an advertising and promotions formula to make your movie successful. You can’t just send out the trailer and go on Lettermen and expect big results. Advertisers need to look at the individual movie and see what the feel of it is, and then match the advertising and promotions to the movie. If it is a hard hitting documentary, you want a hard hitting feel to the advertising so you don’t draw in mockumentary fans that are going to SMS their friends and say, “it sux.” (see SMS Marketing, September 19)
I also posted about a new indie movie entitled, “Outsourced,” that may have a solution to mis-advertised movies. They are cutting out the middleman and doing their own. I love this idea. The same people that had the creativity and the passion to put together a film that they care about should be the same people to market that film with the same creativity and passion. Audience research is full of phony numbers and statistics on demographics and psychographics. Most of it is intuition anyway. So let the people that love their movie market it. You don’t need a marketing degree to see everyone is doing the same thing and know that you need to be out of the box in order to get noticed.
Giving power to individuals is changing the way people research audiences. In my Audience research class, we talk about, “cost per thousand,” and, “gross rating points,” amongst a myriad of other ways professionals measure how effective a particular ad strategy will be. They use these buzz words and numbers to justify their spending where an independent person would just go with their gut. My professor said at the beginning of the semester, if you came up with the Nielson system of measuring TV ratings and handed it in as your final project at any university, you would have failed. Yeah, it’s that bad, and that is what the pros are using to spend advertising dollars.
I job shadowed a professional in NYC and found out some more cool stuff. The pros are moving away from GRPs and such. A GRP from the radio is not the same as a GRP from TV. Nor can you really measure GRP from a facebook group, or sticky notes posted all over a subway, or from a huge truck with your movie’s poster and soundtrack blaring while it drives through the city. Every ad agency is coming up with new abbreviations to describe how involved and effective a medium is. They are going through all this red tape so that they can prove to their clients that they are using their money wisely. Well and indie filmmaker is using her or his own money and more importantly investing themselves. These people are only going to pursue what they think will work. And they are not answering to some executive. I can see more and more indie filmmakers moving away from the big production studios in order to promote their movies the way they want to, the way they should be.
Just like the blogosphere, the movie business is getting crowded. Maybe crowded is the wrong word. It assumes that there is a finite space that will eventually have no more room.
Just like the blogoshpere, the movie business is becoming populated. And hopefully it will continue to grow in numbers and be filled with individuals that think for themselves. Those are the people I want advertising their movies to me.
There is a lot of opinion and voice in what I just wrote. And I love blogs for giving me this opportunity. I wrote this blog for class, Audience Research, as I have stated before. But I feel like I learned more about blogging then the movie advertising business. I found out it is hard to keep up a blog over time, but after talking with some professionals, I think it’s worth it. You may know Greg Verdino from Crayon Marketing, he keeps up his blog. He said to me that sometimes he feels like the blog is a lot of work too. But then someone calls him about something he wrote and asks him to come in and meet with them. Then he realizes it is worth it.
I think so too. I will keep bloging. As I look for jobs throughout my life, my blog will act as a cover letter to everything. People can see what I think and what I like. They can get to know me from my commentary on different things and hopefully look at whatever issue I am talking about a little differently. And who knows, some day I just might find myself being contacted because I said something someone important liked. So look for J Tags in the future for more fun commentary. And get your own, there are never enough voices in the blogosphere.
