Today, mainstream movies are more expensive than they’ve ever been. As movies wrestle with how to market in today’s media landscape, it’s time
to look back at ingenious marketing campaigns that catapulted movies to
success, often on a shoestring budget.
Marketing With the Internet
Without the internet, a lot of the most memorable marketing campaigns
wouldn’t exist. The ability to reach a wider audience, through an
interactive format distinct from commercials, has been a massive benefit
to the industry. Even then, it’s one that most projects fail to leverage
in a way that makes a splash.
The average moviegoer is also a lot more sophisticated thanks to the
internet. They have thousands of blogs, social media feeds, and other
platforms that help them gain insight into movie-making and the media
landscape as a whole. This isn’t unique to media, it’s something that
happens in e-commerce and online entertainment too. Just like with movies,
fans of activities like playing casino games online can find all the
information they need to make better-informed decisions about the services
they use. They can access
Stake casino reviews with pros and cons
displayed for the site, learning more about the service than they would
without the internet. The same can be said for movie studios, their
directors, and even the actors in those movies, as most have a social
media presence nowadays.
Three Ingenious Marketing Campaigns
Paranormal Activity
Made with a production budget of just $15,000 (plus $215,000
post-production), the first Paranormal Activity movie became a box office
phenomenon that brought in nearly $200 million. It was more than a
successful movie, however, as it launched Blumhouse into the mainstream.
To this day, they’re still one of the most successful studios out there
simply because
Blumhouse keeps budgets small. They make a lot of projects and, when they hit, they become cultural
moments.
To market Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse held screenings across the world
and gave horror audiences what they wanted – scares. Specifically, footage
of other people watching the film and being scared. It was effective, and
infinitely shareable on the internet in 2007, when viral marketing was
still young.
The Blair Witch Project
Before Paranormal Activity, The Blair Witch Project was the most famous,
low-budget hit to come out of the horror genre. Made for about $60,000 (to
as much as $750,000 in post-production), everybody knows the movie’s plot
by now. Three filmmakers enter the woods looking to investigate the Blair
Witch and go missing, but they leave some spooky footage behind. That
footage is the movie, pioneering the 'found footage' genre,
explained here by Studio Binder.
To market the Blair Witch, they did something that was probably a whole
lot easier back in 1999 – they pretended its characters were real people
who were actually missing. They created a proto-ARG involving a website
and faked missing posters of the characters. The actors weren’t invited to
its Cannes premiere and even had IMDb pages that claimed they were dead.
Going into first screenings, some thought it was a macabre crime
documentary like the kind you’d see on Netflix today.
Chronicle
Away from the horror genre, Chronicle is another found footage movie that
put actors like Michael B. Jordan and Dane DeHaan on the map. It had a
considerably larger budget at $15 million and leaned into a lot of
traditional marketing practices, ultimately bringing in over $126 million
at the box office. Presented as a video diary, it showed how three
different personalities were affected by receiving the same set of
powers.
The image of three plainclothed men flying through the air was at the
center of Chronicle’s marketing strategy. It was used in posters, in the
trailer, and then in real life. Uploaded to YouTube, the marketing team
created special man-shaped drones and flew them over New York in the
daytime. Their video, and bystander videos from the ground, quickly went
viral. Today, the production video has 9.1 million views, more than any
trailer of the movie uploaded on YouTube.
These marketing campaigns, and other similar guerilla marketing efforts,
can conjure box office returns out of seemingly thin air. In the age of
big-budget movies with even bigger marketing budgets, studios should learn
from their example and try to capture innovative, viral moments that can
propel a project to success. This kind of marketing doesn't have to be
expensive and, when it works, it can pay off tenfold.