Marketing (Avatar and John Carter)

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

Marketing is the process a studio goes through to promote, sell and make money from their film. Marketing is an integral part of Hollywood and is one of the main reasons why a film is successful or not. Marketing allows the studio to identify their target market, to meet their expectations and to keep them.

The best example of advertising leading to a successful film is of course Avatar. Avatar spent $223,000,000 on advertising, almost the same amount as they spent on production. Marketing was very important for Avatar because they had to create the film so it would be perceived in a certain way. By causing the audience the audience to perceive the film in a certain way then they can also convince them to pay to go and see the film. Avatar predominantly used digital marketing. One aspect of digital marketing is social media. Social media allows studios to target many different types of people in huge numbers. It turns the audience into active participants in promoting the film. Another aspect of digital marketing is websites. Avatar’s website had regular competitions which attracted new customers and kept existing fans coming back to the website which helps keep the film in the publics mind until its release date. The site was actually used so much that at one point it crashed. All this makes the customer feel involved in Avatar as they are spreading the word about and influencing the public’s perception of the film.

Avatar was a new idea so they had to explain what the story was about, who was in it and also make it sound appealing to the audience, so they made a trailer. The trailer for Avatar in my opinion is the greatest movie trailer of all time. It has everything a trailer needs to draw in the audience and make them perceive the film in a way the studio would want them to. It shows exactly what the film is about and presents a clear picture of the story. It also highlights key generic themes within the film by portraying who is the villain and who is the hero. It also uses the director’s star status and highlights his other work to promote Avatar. By showing James Cameron’s other films such as Titanic and Aliens it makes the audience think that if those films were good then this one must be just as good maybe better. The trailer also focuses on the main selling point of the film, the 3D aspect and special effects it uses. This was something that had never been seen before and because it was a new cinematic experience for the audience the trailer used that to attract audiences.

Like the trailer the posters for Avatar are clear in getting their message across. All the posters have the same colours, characters and tag line on them. This is so the audience can see them and instantly recognize that it is Avatar because of the consistency in their posters. This created a certain perception of the film and reinforced it, heightening audience expectations.

The main reasons why Avatar was so successful was it successfully engaged audiences using several media campaigns, the marketing materials all sent out the same message and created the perception this was a unique film and it relied on a familiar genre and narrative but gave audiences a totally unique experience at the same time. Avatar proves that by going all out on marketing and making the audience perceive the film in a particular way it helps the film be successful as Avatar made 2,782,275,172 at the box office and is the highest grossing film in the history of film.

Another example of how marketing can determine how successful a film can be is Disney’s John Carter. The films negative cost were $250,000,000 but they only spent $100,000,000 on advertising, considerably less than Avatar. When Avatar was released Fox made sure that it was advertised everywhere. However I didn’t see any John Carter posters, trailers or visit the website, something I did do when I heard about Avatar. Disney also failed to take advantage of their horizontal integration. Avatar had action figures, games and toys all over the world, however Disney didn’t stock any John Carter toys in their stores, which didn’t raise any awareness about the film. Also John Carter’s posters were not good. The posters were all very different using different colour themes; different characters on each poster and some of the posters didn’t look like they were for the same film. The posters confused me as they didn’t offer any explanation of what the film is about and didn’t appeal to me in any way. John Carter’s trailer is arguably the worst trailer I have seen. It didn’t explain the story in any way and gave the perception that the film was confusing and too adventurous. John Carter basically didn’t do anything that Avatar did and that is why it failed, because its marketing campaign wasn’t good enough and didn’t give a good perception of the film.