How effective is the combination of your main
product and your ancillary tasks?
During our Foundation Portfolio, we created a short film, a poster and a review for Little White Lies magazine. In this post I will look at how these products work together to create a successful marketing campaign.
We decided in research and planning that our short film will be targeted at young adult males aged 15 and over. We had to reflect this not only with our main product but our ancillary tasks as well
Our short film can be marketed in a few different ways:
- Social media - This marketing method works with our product well because our target audience, young adult males aged 15 and over, use social media websites like Facebook and Twitter more than most other demographics.
- Word of mouth - The most basic way of spreading word, approaching persuading people to watch your short film isn't the quickest way to get your film out there. But people you tell enjoy the film, they could tell other people, which can slowly gain local recognition.
- Free insert in newspaper or magazine - a more expensive (but effective) way to market the film, we could give out free copies of the film in newspapers, which could give the film national recognition. Our target audience doesn't read newspapers as much as other demographics, so our short film might not appeal to those who do read newspapers, which is the issue with this method.
- Film festivals - entering the film into a film festival can get the film even wider recognition as we are putting the short film up for lots of people to see
The Poster:
The poster is very important because it is what can attract or repel potential viewers to your short film. Our poster needed to be both informative for anyone looking at the poster and visually attractive for those viewers, especially to young adult males aged 15 and over.
We wanted our poster to convey to audiences what genre the film is and hint at what the plot could be.
Our short film is a thriller. This is clearer on the poster Sofia and I made, which has a masked face in low key lighting. This creates enigma (a main thriller convention), as the audience will question who the masked man is.
The other poster Callum made is better at giving the audience hints at what the plot could be. The poster shows our protagonist and antagonist in the middle of the poster (Neeson on the left, J on the right), looking away from each other. There is also a tagline that says 'the finest detective, against the finest killer'. This tells the audience that this film is about a detective on the hunt for a serial killer.
Both posters use a lack of colours, the only colours used are black, white, some red and a
Linked with film:
We link the poster to our short film mainly by showing the main character(s) of the short film on our poster. In Callum's poster, we have an image of Neeson taken straight from our short film.
What we didn't do, though looking back I think we should've done, was make the title font of our short film the same as the title font for our posters. It would've made the link between the short film and the poster clearer to the audience.
Our short film is a thriller. This is clearer on the poster Sofia and I made, which has a masked face in low key lighting. This creates enigma (a main thriller convention), as the audience will question who the masked man is.
The other poster Callum made is better at giving the audience hints at what the plot could be. The poster shows our protagonist and antagonist in the middle of the poster (Neeson on the left, J on the right), looking away from each other. There is also a tagline that says 'the finest detective, against the finest killer'. This tells the audience that this film is about a detective on the hunt for a serial killer.
Both posters use a lack of colours, the only colours used are black, white, some red and a
Linked with film:
We link the poster to our short film mainly by showing the main character(s) of the short film on our poster. In Callum's poster, we have an image of Neeson taken straight from our short film.
What we didn't do, though looking back I think we should've done, was make the title font of our short film the same as the title font for our posters. It would've made the link between the short film and the poster clearer to the audience.
The Review:
Reviews are hard to market your product with because in real life, you have no control over what the review will say; what we said in the review we made was our own opinions. Our target audience of young adult males aged 15 and over are unlikely to read magazines like Little White Lies, but this can appeal to other demographics.
If the review is overall positive about Exhibit J, we can use it as a marketing tool. Our short film could also appeal to those who read LWLs. LWLs readers are mainly aged between 25 and 35, and they work in media or graphic design, or they are general film fanatics. It will also create a lot of hype around the film if the review is good, as people will think 'If the critics like the film, then we might like it too'.
However, if the review is negative about the film, we can't use it as a marketing tool. If we were to use it, it will put most of our potential viewers off our film, and the hype around our film will vanish. Those film fanatics and media or graphic design workers aged between 25 and 35 will not watch our film. We would have to resort to other marketing strategies that would appeal to other demographics (students or working class adults etc).
How the review WE did links to the film/poster:
As all Little White Lies reviews do, we have used a screenshot from the film to put at the top of the review. The picture of Neeson we used was also used in one of the posters, which created synergy between the poster and the review. We also used a quote from the review in our posters, or we tried to. I believe we changed our review a lot, the quotes on the posters are inaccurate now.
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