A marketing campaign is a company’s effort to increase awareness for a particular product or service. Marketing campaigns are needed in the film industry to promote films and in a way, film trailers are seen as marketing campaigns, as their purpose is to promote the film.
When a film is released at the cinema it has only a short space of time to become a ‘box-office hit’. The marketing campaign plays a vital role in telling the potential audience about the film and in encouraging them to see it in the cinema. The company who own the film and loan it to the cinema to show for a period of time are called the distributors, because they distribute the film around the country.
The distributors want the film to be as successful as possible so they create a
marketing campaign which aims to raise awareness of the film and arouse interest. In this way the distributors stand the best chance of making a profit on the film.
The trailer is very important in distributing a film, as it determines whether or not audiences will want to see it. Other than hearing about a new film from friends or family, or seeing it on a poster or website, I ultimately make the decision whether or not to go to the cinema and pay to see a film by watching the trailer for it, as the trailer shows clips from the film, and pieces them together to create the general story of it, whilst not giving away the ending and enticing a potential audience to go and see what it is. Posters are important in capturing the initial interest of the audience but they cannot convey the excitement and atmosphere of film in the same way as a trailer does.
