industry Indie movie marketing tips?

[Scoopicman]

Wondering why filmmakers spend thousands of dollars to shoot a film . And then don't want to spend money to market their film?

This quote is from another thread., debating why people don't market. I created this thread to hear from those who do. What worked? What do you think works for the streaming world of today?

In years past, I was notorious for shameless self promotion, especially for a year 2000 movie, called TERRARIUM. You can see some of that news hype in this video:

I hit up every film web site with announcements, sent out free copies of my movie to those willing to review it, paid for 60 thirty second spots for commercials on Cox Cable channels (like SyFy, etc.)., did a DVD and poster signing at Borders Book Store, after convincing them to put my movie on their shelves. I went on as many radio and TV stations as I could, hit up the newspapers, even printed out 5,000 flyers and hired people to put them on windshields in various parking lots. Yeah, a couple of film festivals, as well.

These days, there are less forums. There is less physical product, so sending people DVDs isn't a big thing, like it used to be. Frankly, even sending digital copies of your movie for people to review becomes a huge pirating risk, the more people you send to. I hit up social media. Movie pages can be made on Facebook, etc.

What do you do?

 

[Nate North]

I have some experience with this. I did the same thing you did, back in 2000, except 10 years later. Full court press on the DIY advertising, news interviews, local stores, etc. It sort of works. Film broke even, but very little profit.

Went a few rounds with advertising over the years, and what I eventually learned made me feel like an idiot.

Here's my 15 years of experience with advertising and piracy boiled down.

1. Quit trying to outsmart the advertising. This was my, and is everyone's biggest mistake. Just go right over to the google main desk, or facebook, etc, and start learning about strategic low cost ad deployment at scale. If you do your homework, and the following regular work, you'll find that just going the default route is literally about 20x as effective per hour/dollar than the endless workarounds filmmakers try. The months I spent hard selling that first feature could have been equivocated by dropping a few hundred bucks into the google vending machine. Not really equivocated, but really many times as effective. I still do a few extra things, like call the local news stations, make a few appearances, give stores promotional displays, etc, but the truth is, you will not save money by trying to homebrew advertising. Buy digital, buy bulk, and target carefully through the very robust existing systems. I'll be glad to help you get started if you need some help. It's actually pretty cheap.

2. Everybody quit worrying about piracy. It's not that your film won't get pirated, it's just that literally every film that's been released for the last 25 years has been pirated, and when I hear about people trying to take all these precautions, or worrying about it. it's like watching a cruise ship company try to keep changing routes and dates, to see if they can keep the boat from getting wet. Whatever money piracy will cost you, which isn't much really, you're definitely going to loose whatever you do. End of day, the impact of piracy is much lower than alarmists declare it to be. They like to take the 20 dollar sticker price of a blu ray, multiply that by every villager in turkey that downloaded the film on their phone, and then begin screaming that they have been robbed of 74 million dollars. Here's the thing. Those kids in Turkey live on 70 dollars a month, and watch 30 movies a month. The money is for food I'd assume. I'd say close to 95% of pirated films are downloaded by people who couldn't afford or had no intention of buying the film. Point being, you're not loosing as much money as you think, and even if you were, you're not going to stop it from happening, because no one has, ever. My last feature got pirated, and It made very little difference, other than that I received a few emails from Europe asking why my film didn't have subtitles.

 

[mlesemann]

Everybody quit worrying about piracy.

This 100%.

 

[Scoopicman]

1. Quit trying to outsmart the advertising. This was my, and is everyone's biggest mistake. Just go right over to the google main desk, or facebook, etc, and start learning about strategic low cost ad deployment at scale. If you do your homework, and the following regular work, you'll find that just going the default route is literally about 20x as effective per hour/dollar than the endless workarounds filmmakers try. The months I spent hard selling that first feature could have been equivocated by dropping a few hundred bucks into the google vending machine.

Yeah, that advertising was before Facebook was available. Good points on how to approach now. Would like to hear some examples of what you are talking about. I know you can buy views. One of our producers bought 30,000 views for the DRONE DOWN trailer. He did that, and "Boom," there were 30,000 views the next day. I don't know if those are even real, as I don't see evidence of them generating anything, even comments. Most of the actual feedback and "real" views were through my Facebook campaigns.

I'll be glad to help you get started if you need some help. It's actually pretty cheap.

Cool, thanks!

2. Everybody quit worrying about piracy.

During pre-distribution, you had better worry. If I you get mass pirated before distribution (I'm currently looking with DRONE DOWN and EVIL DWELLS WITHIN), most, if not all, distributors that are aware of this will pass. I had a potential distributor pass on EXILE, simply because I did a limited DVD run. Yes, all films, including mine, get pirated eventually, but if I can get a deal, first, that's kind of important.

With TERRARIUM and EXILE, I sent out scads of DVDs and press kit CD-ROMS to people. Yeah, you can pirate a DVD, but it was a bit of work back then. Fortunately, I didn't get pirated before TERRARIUM was picked up by Lionsgate.

I do have a watermarked screener of DRONE DOWN that select distributors and reviewers can see, but it's not something I want to share with friends, right now.

 

[indietalk]

Pirating can also seriously fuck up a world premiere at a large festival. As in, they drop you.

 

[indietalk]

On the flipside piracy can actually be used as a means of distribution, if all you care about is exposure. The perceived value of a ripped off movie ("it must be good, it's pirated") can spread across the torrents and actually be good for your name/brand. There's some cases of these "leaks" proving to be beneficial.

 

[Nate North]

I think concerns about early leaks are valid. I just mean that big companies have attorneys that make tons of money by scaring the corporations about piracy with biased statistics, and then offering their very expensive services to fight the piracy. Essentially, if you count piracy losses the way they do, you end up with a number that's many times larger than the global entertainment budget. You can't loose money that people weren't spending in the first place. A good way for anti piracy attorneys to pocket 300 an hour on endless litigation, by rationalizing that it would cost companies more not to hire them.

Another issue is that the cat is simply out of the bag, on the tech end of things. Let's say we really wanted to stop piracy. We couldn't. There was a tech advance a few decades ago that decentralized media data, and that's now an infinite hydra, where one cuts off one head and two grow back. You'd have an easier time getting the fluoride back out of the drinking water.

As far as film festivals dropping films over leaks, I think it's kind of stupid. Leaks happen, and some are intentional, and I know there's no way to determine which is which, but still, I think the idea that some ipad screener floating around completely ruins the value of a film's premiere is something that people kind of overestimate. It's a big world. It literally took me 3 months to get around to watching a Star Wars movie, after it's release, so the idea that the second a leak comes out it's this universal disaster, seems overblown.

I have this friend who's nuts about security. He's got so much military grade encryption on a computer containing mostly photos of his family and cat, that it takes him 20 minutes to check an account. I asked him one day how much experience he had with actively trying to get someone interested in something on his computer. Lol. I told him "go to the tallest building in town, wearing a red cape with a motorcycle helmet, and stand on the roof repeatedly screaming your bank account numbers through the bullhorn, 45 minutes in, you will see a single person stop on the sidewalk below, and lift up their phone. You'll think they are going to film your bizarre display, or perhaps make a recording of your bank account for later use, and that's what you'll assume is happening. What's really happening is that their phone just dinged while they were walking by the building, to notify them of a youtube video about a new type of claw hammer, and they have stopped to watch it."

Indietalk makes a valid point, for many filmmakers, exposure is the name of the game, especially indies, and pirates probably quadruple our exposure at a 5-7% tax. We didn't ok that, and I see the moral isssue clearly, but since it's physically impossible to fight the fluoridation, my perception is that it conserves energy to take the benefits and simply forget about things that I have zero control over.

 

[indietalk]

I literally mean on purpose

Intentionally leaked music is newest tactic for artists vying for internet fame - The DePaulia

In a culture where memes run the world, hip-hop has thrived this year like no other genre has. Well over half of the current Billboard Hot 100 songs are primarily by hip-hop artists, but social media has allowed hip-hop to reach massive success beyond what we quantify as successful on a...

depauliaonline.com

Fall Out Boy Leaked Their Own Album on Purpose

Instead of leaving it to fate, the self-proclaimed saviors of Rock and Roll decided to leak their latest album themselves.

www.vice.com

or even for free analytics

Iron Maiden Plans Tours Based on Online Piracy

Headbangers have been studying online piracy to see where they're most popular

www.rollingstone.com

 

[Nate North]

Yeah, I'm aware, that's why I mentioned that it's hard for festivals to tell which ones are intentional, so they have to crack down on everyone. Still, I think it's a case where directors and crews that didn't intentionally leak films get punished unfairly.

It's a difficult position.

Iron Maiden is probably making a smart move here, simply paddling the canoe downstream, lol. More Cowbell. Bruce was always a bit of a genius.

I would point out though that the metrics of this area vary greatly between small independent artists and major IP. No offense to any of us, but it is different if Kill Bill vol 3 gets leaked, than if my film that no one knows about gets leaked. I'd say a quarter million people knowing about a film qualifies as "nobody" and they ruin some kids film premiere because 30 people watched half of it on their phone? Kind of pointless in practicality.

 

[indietalk]

There's these music blogs that post new albums with the download link and the credits and album cover etc. as a blog post. I watched my album moving across these blogs when I was doing google searches and I filled out the DMCA forms on them to take them down, and then I was like whyyyyyyy? Next album I am SUBMITTING to them lol. It was pretty cool because you'd see blog comments like "This rocks" etc. More action than iTunes. Anywho. Yeah,

 

[Nate North]

There's a lot of complexity, but for organic growth, one part is simple.

Let's say you're good, like your album is good. Even the best albums, like Dark Side, Zepplin 4, Somewhere in Time, Back in Black, Bernstien conducts the london philharmonic, or whatever, are only really liked by a small percentage of people. Like maybe 7% of the world population would say they like Dark Side of the Moon or maybe less than 1% for something as seminal as Pretty Hate Machine. So the mentality has to be shotgun, understanding that even the very best of us only really impress one in 20 or less. Getting your thing out there is probably priority number one for an indie, with the math on conventional mercantilism getting drastically better once you've cultivated a wide enough base of true fans.

There's an interesting biography of the band "Green Jelly" on youtube, which details how they basically never thought about anything except getting the music out, and ended up with a good lifetime income and an overall positive experience.

 

[Chris Tempel]

2. Everybody quit worrying about piracy. It's not that your film won't get pirated, it's just that literally every film that's been released for the last 25 years has been pirated, and when I hear about people trying to take all these precautions, or worrying about it. it's like watching a cruise ship company try to keep changing routes and dates, to see if they can keep the boat from getting wet. Whatever money piracy will cost you, which isn't much really, you're definitely going to loose whatever you do. End of day, the impact of piracy is much lower than alarmists declare it to be. They like to take the 20 dollar sticker price of a blu ray, multiply that by every villager in turkey that downloaded the film on their phone, and then begin screaming that they have been robbed of 74 million dollars. Here's the thing. Those kids in Turkey live on 70 dollars a month, and watch 30 movies a month. The money is for food I'd assume. I'd say close to 95% of pirated films are downloaded by people who couldn't afford or had no intention of buying the film. Point being, you're not loosing as much money as you think, and even if you were, you're not going to stop it from happening, because no one has, ever. My last feature got pirated, and It made very little difference, other than that I received a few emails from Europe asking why my film didn't have subtitles.

One thing I've done, for better or for worse, was to pirate my own movie in hopes of getting it in front of more eyes. My logic was someone would find it on the torrent sites and think it might be good since someone went through the trouble to pirate it. Little would they know it was me. I actually had a camcorder film the screen during the premiere and created a tele sync version that I uploaded. Then a few months later, I actually uploaded a clean copy at 720p. This is also the version I ended up using on YouTube. At the end of the day, I maybe got a few hundred extra viewers but it didn't help or hinder me making anything and was largely a waste of time.

 

[CelticRambler]

As far as film festivals dropping films over leaks, I think it's kind of stupid. Leaks happen, and some are intentional, and I know there's no way to determine which is which, but still, I think the idea that some ipad screener floating around completely ruins the value of a film's premiere is something that people kind of overestimate. It's a big world. It literally took me 3 months to get around to watching a Star Wars movie, after it's release, so the idea that the second a leak comes out it's this universal disaster, seems overblown.

Variation on that theme : all those two-minute trailers that summarise the highlights of the entire movie, usually including an unsubtle hint at how it ends.