What's the best way to promote films with online communities?
I was pondering this last night when my friend Jim sent me the trailer for his directorial debut, Eden Lake. As the UK Marketing Director of a major film company recently told me, film promotion has some particular challenges. Speed, for one: the marketing has to be so effective that penetration in the target demographic goes from 0 to 80% in about a fortnight. Flexibility is another: with the right word of mouth, a film that starts playing in only a few cinemas can build up sufficient momentum to get country-wide distribution in a matter of days.
But while film production companies might specialise in particular genres, the film distribution arms (on which they depend hugely for successful sales and marketing) usually don't - one week it's art-house, the next grisly horror. Since the target audience is changing all the time, it's no wonder that their marketing is usually highly tactical, very campaign-based, and quite traditional - mainly above-the-line promotion on TV, billboards and in cinemas. Sometimes viral campaigns are thrown in, but these tend to be short-lived, fairly hit-and-miss affairs.
So how should online communities be used to promote films? By their very nature, communities take some time to grow the social bonds that make them sustainable. So aside from the multi-film franchises, few individual films have enough time in their marketing slot to generate community on their own micro-sites.
But there is an alternative: to treat the microsite as a hub, which connects the official site to the multiple other spaces where community and conversations can form. The site of upcoming Bond release Quantum of Solace has done this successfully by mixing exclusive content with links to fan sites on social networks (like MySpace and Facebook). It also has a download section to promote cross-linking with widgets that allow consumers to add features to their own social networking or blog sites. In fact, it's exactly the same approach that we recommend to our clients when they're building a customer community - they should see it as a space they manage that can also integrate with the other external sites they participate in.
The other advantage of this approach is that it can help distinguish the official from the user-generated content, some of which might be well-produced enough to lead to genuine confusion. Admittedly the amusing re-edit of The Shining trailer as a romantic comedy is unlikely to mislead anyone. But well-made spoof or malicious content can have adverse effects on a brand if people think it's genuine - ask the banks, who suffer from the many phishing emails that no doubt turn up in your spam box every day. Equally if, like my friend Jim, your film is about a gang of louts targeting a young couple, you don't want really user-generated re-enactments as part of your marketing campaign...
So when it comes to short-lived, campaign-based marketing, a central hub that links to other sites might be more appropriate than a dedicated community site. Real community takes time to form and should be sustainable - it's a long-term relationship, not just a one night stand.
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