Film Marketing into the Twenty-First Century

Nolwenn Mingant, Cecilia Tirtaine, Joël Augros, Nolwenn Mingant, Cecilia Tirtaine, Joël Augros

• Editore: British Film Institute
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781844578412
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Film Direction & Production

How do you sell British humour to a French audience? Could piracy actually be good for the film business? Why are The Hobbit's revolutionary technologies not mentioned in some adverts? Exploring these questions and many more, Film Marketing into the Twenty-First Century draws on insights from renowned film academics and leading industry professionals to chart the evolution of modern film marketing. The first part of the book focuses on geographical considerations, showing how marketers have to adapt their strategies locally as films travel across borders. The second covers new marketing possibilities offered by the Internet, as Vine, Facebook and other participative websites open new venues for big distributors and independents alike. Straddling practical and theoretical concerns and including case studies that take us from Nollywood to Peru, this book provides an accessible introduction to the key issues at stake for film marketing in a global era.

I

MARKETING AND FILM CULTURE

‘There simply isn’t one-shape-fits-all for film’

An Interview with Michael Williams-Jones

Nolwenn MINGANT

Starting his career as a trainee for United Artists in Africa, Michael Williams-Jones soon became the Managing Director for Brazil, Latin America, Brazil and, later, the United Kingdom. In the late 1970s, he became president of United Artists International. He was in charge of Global Distribution and Marketing as well as Theatres and Production in certain regions. In 1981, as United Artists folded after the Heaven’s Gate debacle, he was asked by Lew Wasserman, chief executive of MCA Corporation (owner of Universal), and Charles Bluhdorn, chief executive of Gulf & Western (owner of Paramount), to head United International Pictures (UIP), their new joint venture, based in London. Williams-Jones headed UIP for fifteen years, until 1996. After years of working with major studios, he was very keen to work for a top independent company. Bob and Harvey Weinstein invited him to run Miramax International for a year before he finally retired in 2005.¹

How would you define film marketing?

Understanding your market and understanding your movie. Period. It goes back very early in the process of the production of a movie. The earlier the better. It’s no good to start conceptual marketing at the point when the movie is made and you screen it. You have to have read the book or the screenplay and started to formulate views and ideas of how it might appeal, where its strongest and its weakest elements might be. And it must be examined almost forensically. And you examine it not only from one territory, but also from the points of view and interest of different markets. How would that story be best presented in Korea or Brazil or Russia or France? There is a priceless value in local knowledge. It’s arrogant, but also idiotic to make critical decisions only in the so-called hallowed ground of a studio based in Hollywood. Unless you have people who genuinely know the heart and soul and character of the French or the Germans or the Italians or the British or whoever, how can you possibly make judgments affecting them? In most industries, you’ll see that a great deal of respect is paid to local expertise through franchises, joint ventures or relationships to the local organisations. It is true there has been a sea change in technology which has changed marketing perceptions, but if you go around the world, you will still sense powerful differences in culture … And what you can fundamentally gain through good local knowledge is an understanding of what these differences are and how to apply them to the marketing and selling of movies.

Can you give an example of marketing campaign adaptation?

Adaptation can be about changing the timing or the appearance of a marketing campaign, the addition of elements that are particularly appealing to local identities or the removal of elements. The first Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark was a global hit in 1981, a time when we had just formed UIP. It worked in every country enormously. But I was confused by the film’s failure in Japan, as it was the only country in the world where it did not perform. I ran a series of tests of the film in several cities in Japan and was astonished by the results. The original campaign showed Harrison Ford with a whip, a leather jacket and a Western cowboy hat. In fact, the Japanese reacted very negatively to the hat, very simply because hats had a very strong association with pre-war Japan. They were not fashionable and so were seen as negative in terms of seeing the film. I thought we’d have a little fun. We completely re-engineered the marketing campaign. Obviously we couldn’t take the hat out of the film or the trailers. But in the presentations of the film – print ads and poster ads were very powerful in those days – we had a campaign with Harrison Ford without a hat, looking very dashing and daring. We released the film tentatively at first, then more broadly. It became a smash hit and set up the franchise. It’s an illustration that you just cannot ignore local interest issues.

How do marketers get to know a specific local audience?

Back in the days of Irving Thalberg, movies were tested in front of audiences in the final stage of development, which is a very smart thing to do. It helps understand audience appeal. We would not only test the movie, but also trailers, poster concepts and various marketing concepts to selected audiences. Testing, however, should provide only additional information. Also the information obtained that way should not be read as the Bible, but put into context. You have to have the guts to put a lot of the decision-making into the hands of the people who understand the local market. Sometimes backing a local expert gives you a real added edge.

In 2001, you wrote an op-ed piece in Variety² to defend foreign marketers’ expertise. What was happening at the time which made you react?

One problem was the burgeoning new philosophy that every film, or the majority of films, had to be released globally at the same time. There was this whole concept that we were in a global village and everything should be instantly made available because information was feeding around the world so quickly via the internet and if you waited the product would no longer be fresh. There was also the very real problem of piracy. So the big new idea was to release everything instantly and globally. But this doesn’t take into consideration local nuances. There is, for example, the seasonality issue to examine. In certain markets, in the early 1990s, many theatres around the world were not air-conditioned, so why release in the heat of summer? Especially if this is a holiday season, like France, which empties out in August.

Now, in certain cases, global release is, of course, the right thing to do – for example, for pre-established franchises, like James Bond or Spiderman, as well as sequels or prequels and major animated events. The product is already known, so you can have a common campaign designed by a studio, which is rubber-stamped around the world. But where that studio philosophy becomes a problem is when they’ve got a new film, a unique product which is not known and hasn’t been established with its own identity in each market. If you decide you’re going to blast out with a Hollywood-designed campaign and that’s it, you’re actually putting the movie at risk. You need to have input from all the different markets. Not every market will create its own campaign, as there are cost issues that have to be considered. But some necessarily will. I remember, for example, Italy, France and Germany and the United Kingdom, in Europe, all had very distinctive ways of portraying a film. There is a different process. Italy and France always produced magnificent posters, stylish works of art, often abstract but connected in terms of the theme. Trailers would evolve differently, not in the more heavy-handed Hollywood style but often with European subtleties. A movie that is a new original idea, that needs to be tailored to the local market, should not be released simultaneously. There are times when it is a good idea to establish a film in a few markets and then gradually roll out the rest, basing the strategy upon the cumulative success as it builds on word of mouth, etc. One has to be sensible and nuance the release of prototype films. I think this is a very important aspect of global marketing: there simply isn’t one-shape-fits-all for film.

You say marketers should be involved very early in the production process. What room are producers giving marketers in the film’s production choices?

Well, that process has moved a long way. Today, with the economic growth of the global marketplace – Russia, China, Eastern Europe or Korea, the simple box-office influence of the global market is such that smart and experienced film-makers – and ‘greenlighters’ – have realised that input from these areas is invaluable. It need not be merely in the marketing area. It could be, for example, in the casting. For a film with a sequence shot in South-East Asia, the local marketers could suggest local actors who are at that time extremely popular in South Korea or Japan. Casting based upon international knowledge is very important. But this influence goes beyond casting, with music, with other creative areas in film production. Bringing in the input from local specialists can be profoundly important at a very early stage. More and more this is being recognised. But it’s not new. Way back, United Artists, about from 1970–8, brought in marketing managers and distribution managers from all around the world to New York to grind out ideas. If there was a good thought, it would find its way to the actual film itself. So, very early on, before the product is made, marketers – in Europe and elsewhere – would understand what it is. During the production process, marketers should really be involved in designing advertising and promotional materials at the very earliest stage, from the point the project is actually being greenlit. These early initiatives can filter into the marketplace as teasers and grow the interest of newly conceived movies. By the time the film is ready to come out, you’ve got people who really do understand what they’ve got to market and sell and a public already aware of the movie …

What are the biggest difficulties for marketers?

The biggest obstacle in marketing a film is if it’s a bad movie. If you’ve got a ‘turkey’, as we used to call them, it’s very difficult to turn that into a rose. But film-makers will invariably blame film marketing or bad distribution for a film’s failure.

The other thing that we should never forget: if you are unable to make your product stand above the clutter, you limit your chances to succeed. You’ve got to find something unique. Hitchcock used to call it the McGuffin, the secret alchemy that makes something special. The problem nowadays is that there is so much that looks the same. The trailers look the same. In film marketing, what you need to do is be able to have a unique identity or as unique an identity for that film in the marketplace as you can. That’s got to be your first objective. How do we separate our movie from the pack? What is special or different about it? It may not even be that good, but how can we make it appear to be interesting and different?

What would you say were the most important evolutions for film marketing in the past decades?

Technologies and delivery systems and the advertising opportunities they provide. When I came into the industry, you primarily relied on print, posters, trailers in cinemas and a few other promotional devices...