Promotion
Promotion involves both advertising and publicity. Advertising consists of paid for space (in a magazine for instance) or time (on television and radio); publicity covers all the other promotional activities. For example, an advertisement in a magazine Time Out will cost £4095 for a full page and £2573 for a half page, while a review in the same publication will not cost anything. The review, of course, may be negative and therefore be useless as publicity.
Publicity also includes interviews and profiles on a film's stars and, sometimes, the director. This would also be 'free of charge' to the film's distributors (who are responsible for the marketing) and will be positive. In addition, newspapers, magazines, radio and television programmes may carry stories about the making of the film; most of which would be positive. Distributors can be confident that coverage will be positive because of the nature of the 'publicity circus'. For instance, film magazines know if they are critical of a film star they are not likely to get to interview them in future. As stars are important selling points for the magazines this would be detrimental to their sales. Hence most non-review coverage accentuates the positive. Similarly stars and celebrities only appear on chat shows if they have an opportunity to plug their new film/song/album/book. For more on film promotion see extract on promotion.
The promotion must be affective in two ways: (a) it must give the right impression about the film (b) to the appropriate audience. For instance, the marketing of Scary Movie (2000) had to make clear it was a teen horror spoof to the core 16-25 year old cinema-going audience.
Types of advertising and publicity
Advertising
Publicity
Promotion: the East is East campaign
Campaign objective:
To position East is East in the media and in the public domain as a must-see, hugely successful, critically praised, hip, British comedy for all and everyone to enjoy.
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Slide 35 |
The East is East campaign very successfully positioned the film as a movie about generational conflict that appealed to all cultures. This was done by emphasising the 'universality' of having problems with parents and by emphasising the risqué ('rude') elements. Using the following links, assess the ways in which the various promotional texts conveyed the desored message to the audience or consider why each particular promotional vehicle was used.
Advertising
Publicity
In terms of generating publicity FilmFour had a 'hit list' of 'target media' through which they wanted to address their audience. These target media were:
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Slide 40 |