Question: Assess the importance of marketing in the media area you have studied.
Media is a very versatile subject because there is so many different domains we all call media, like radio, television, film, music, and newspaper. In this essay I will mainly focus on the domain of film, assessing the importance of marketing. In my opinion, marketing is the most important part of the film making process because that is the only way your audience will know about the movie. Film makers must market to make sure their audience wants to spend their money to watch their movie.
In the case study of the “Ugly Dolls” movie, their marketing article talked about the marketing strategies they used in order to get people to want to watch the movie when it comes out. The article stated how they put out trailers and posters before the movie came out to tease people to want to watch the upcoming movie. In the first trailer they mostly showed their famous singing celebrities to show people that the movie is going to be a great musical because they had such great voices in the movie like Kelly Clarkson, Nick Jonas, and Janelle Monae, etc. This strategy helped them get more potential viewers because the celebrities used in the movie have big followings which would help get the word out to more people. But even good strategies like this one don’t always guarantee a success in film making. In the opposing article in this case study was called, “Ugly Dolls is a flop”, states the movie “Ugly Dolls” was the first animated film released from STX films, which means they had a lot riding on this movie, but they faced some challenges due to the new Pokémon movie coming out that same weekend which took most of their young viewers away from their movie. This evidence helps me come up with a theme that not every marketing strategy works the same for every company, other things may work better than others.
I wanted to compare some of the case studies because the movies are so different, and I wanted to see the different marketing techniques they used in order to bring viewers to their movie to prove my theme. For the movie “Black Panther” they used different marketing techniques like cross promotion with the artist they used on the soundtrack. As a marketing technique they used very known musicians for their soundtrack like Kendrick Lamar and SZA, which helped keep their soundtrack at number one on Billboard charts for weeks. According to the case study they also played a trailer of the movie at the NBA all-stars game because they knew it was going to be a lot of people watching so they knew it would be a great way to get people to want to watch the movie. They also did a cross promotion with Lexus where they used the cars in the movies and they also did a commercial for Lexus to get even more people to watch the movie. Even though the marketing strategies are very helpful, they really didn’t have to promote that much because people already wanted to watch this movie because it was very important to the black community to see a black superhero based in Africa. That was another reason why this movie did well in theaters and in the box office, which also goes back to my theme that some marketing strategies work better for some movies than others.
Another case study I chose to do was “The Beauty and the Beast” because its different from the animation film and the Marvel film and as was stated previously I wanted to compare the marketing techniques for different movies. Based on the case study they used synergy with ABC’s “The Bachelor” to promote the movie coming out. Since both networks are known for their work, it was a great way to get lots of people to know about the upcoming movies. The case study also states that they did many successful cross promotions like, Kohl’s, Twitter, and Apple. Kohl’s premiered many different clothing merchandises as a strategy to get more people to know about the movie. Twitter and Apple also added stickers so people can send them to their friends. This movie was also one of the earliest live action Disney movies and everybody wanted to see how they would make the beast look beastly enough. They also created lots of toys and clothes they put on the Disney website for children to play with. They used this marketing strategy to mainly target children to get their parents to buy movie tickets for them which raised tickets sales.
Now that we’ve discussed three totally different movies with three totally different target audiences, you understand which marketing strategies worked best for them and the marketing strategies that didn’t work as well as they thought it would. All in all, not all strategies work for every movie, find your particular audience and you all the strategies to get them to want to watch your film.
