How important is marketing to a films success or failure at the box office

Marketing has shown to be very important to the success or failure of a film. A good marketing campaign will attempt to create a ‘perception’ of a film in the public’s consciousness. This will mean that they will be thinking about it so that when the film is released they will be tempted to see it.  If effective, a set of ‘expectations’ will be created and these expectations will be used to appeal to audience groups. Before marketing products are created, studios will identify a ‘Target Audience’ and tailor their marketing to match the needs and wants of that audience.

In this answer I will give you two examples of film. One which succeeded due to its marketing and one which failed due to its marketing.

‘Avatar’ was a hugely successful film and was released in 2009. The marketing cost of Avatar was $223,000,000, which shows how much was put into getting the idea and concept of Avatar into the minds of the audience. Avatar used many forms of marketing up until the day when the film was eventually released.

The first of these was ‘Digital Marketing’. This is marketing that makes use of electronic devices like computers and mobile phones as well as using platforms such as social networking sites and video sharing sites.

One of these plat forms was social networking which was used to perform ‘’Viral Marketing’. This means that the producers and distributors will put a concept out in the Internet and then through their own means the audience themselves will spread the word through word of mouth or ‘Facebook likes’ and ‘Twitter Re-Tweets’.  

Another form of ‘Digital marketing’ was by using  ‘Twitter’. According to ‘Sysomos’, a social media analytics firm, ‘avatar’ was the most talked about film on twitter in January 2010. Some of those tweets resulted from a “tweet to listen” promo that required fans to send a message on twitter in order to listen to music from the film.

            Other forms of social media digital marketing used by Avatar branched to YouTube, Flickr and a TypePad blogging community. The YouTube video views came close to 11 million while the Flickr photo views came to 1 million and the blogging community had close to 4,000 members.

Another form of marketing used was a 16 minute long clip of the film, which was shown to those who went to see Imax movies on the 21^st of August 2009. This helped to bring more publicity. The 21^st was also thought to be ‘Avatar Day’ where toys, videogame trailers and the teaser trailer were all released a day apart. This meant that the fans were bombarded with thoughts of avatar.

Another way in which the film was marketed was by creating hype about ‘the return of James Cameron’, who had disappeared from the film industry since his huge success of Titanic.

All of these things came together to help bring more public attention to the film and cause more publicity for Avatar.

John Carter however was a film where marketing had a negative effect and possibly caused the film to fail.

            The first negative act of marketing was the posters. Each poster had a different theme, colour scheme and logo. This caused great confusion in the public, as they had no idea what to expect from this film, which had a great effect on its views. The different feel of the posters also brought different idea of what the film was going to include and what form of certificate it would receive. One poster had a very dark colour tone with a deep red pattern on it, which brought with it a sinister feel to it causing some fans to believe it to be an 18 certificate, believing it to bee a form of horror or thriller film. The logo is also a white generic font, which brings no character or recognition to the film. This is contrasted with another poster, which had the figure of a four-armed alien creature with a bright yellow block letter font logo. The difference in films will also bring great confusion to the public, as they will not be able to instantly recognise it if they see it, as there are multiple logos.

            The second negative act of marketing was the trailer. The trailer had a lot of events taking place but no identifiable overall narrative causing the audience to be confused by what the film is actually about.