How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary texts?

The film distributor is the person releasing the films publicly, as well as creating posters, trailers and magazine advertisements in order to target its largest possible audience. Film distribution is the process in which the film goes through in order to make it watchable for its audience, for example being released on DVD or at the cinema. These two factors of distribution are key points in order to get a film noticed.


Advertising and promotional techniques are used in order to entice the audience and ultimately sell the film, advertising of the film can be done through many synergies, such as, billboards, trailers, the internet, cinema, magazines, word of mouth, radio and many more. All these being things that people interact with in their everyday lives, therefore targetting various audiences.

Advertising techniques have to be consistent in order to be memorable, when making and producing all these different promotions there has to be something memorable which will catch the audiences eye every time so that they know what product is being advertised. For example in the James Bond films they now don't even have to write the title and often just have the '007' logo because this has become an recognisable advertising technique within itself. We have also tried to use this technique within our film and our memorable logo is our film title Alice, which is featured on all advertising techniques and promotions.

Marketing can differ depending on the target audience for the chosen media product, for example films that target young adults and teenagers such as Twilight and Harry Potter would often find that audiences would be more effected by advertising such as word of mouth, trailers and social networking sites. Things such as word of mouth and talk about new films on social networking sites like Facebook are more likely to encourage young people to want to watch the film, as teenagers will normally like what their friends like or sometimes just follow the trend.

Audience research is a huge value to distribution companies when it comes to developing their campaigns, this is because distributors are able to clearly distinguish what it is that their target audience are wanting. As we did when producing our teaser trailer, they will often conduct viewings or questionaires in which they will then recieve the audience feeback which then allows them to change and adapt certain features which majority of audiences have picked up on.

Examples of how advertising varies -





Gnomeo & Juliet is an animated family film, mainly targetting young children. The colour scheme is bright and vibrant with childlike characters which attracts and plays to its audience. The film is loosely based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet which is recognised as the pun in the title.
















Due date is an American comedy road film targetting young adults. The colour scheme is normal lighting, which suggests a conventional 'normal' day. The genre of the film is easily recognised by Zach Galifianakis facial expression and other props around him such as the dog he is holding and the cast on Robert Downey JR's arm.

The Notebook is a romantic film of a couple who fall in love during the early 1940's. The main picture clearly distinguish's the genre by the pose the actors are holding, the rain also connotes the whole 'kissing in the rain' sager associated with romance. I think the main target audience for this film, and most other romances, would be females and I believe that we are addressed by the connotations of love. 

Finally this last film poster is for The Final Destination which is a horror, targeting a young adult audience. The genre is shown through the low key lighting and dark colours used which are all associated with the genre specific convention. 

An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages which share a single idea which make up marketing communication and appear in different media synergies across a period of time. These sort of campaign's can be found throughout things such as, the internet, YouTube, Television, Social networking sites, radio and many more. All these things are attracting a target audience, in a different a unique way. For example 

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com 

'your number 1 source for horror' is a viral campaign aimed at young adults. The two main things I found would appeal to their audiences the most are: 

1. People can join the group on the social networking sites, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace which are very popular around young adults and teenagers.
2. They feature latest  reviews and coming soon films that teenagers would be very interested in.

I mainly found this website effective because of the language they use, this is the key thing in order to attract a teenage audience by talking to them as though you are talking to a friend. 

A unified identity is something that can stand alone and be recognisable as part of a film. For example as mentioned above the James Bond 007 logo is so significant as a recognisable brand and advertising technique that is it able to stand alone and audiences are able to link it with the James Bond Films. Another key feature which is highly recognisable throughout James Bond advertising is the theme music, when audiences hear this soundtrack they immediately know that a James Bond film is being advertised. 

My Marketing Campaign

The film classification we decided to go with for 'Alice' was 15, we choose this category as we felt it gave us a wider and larger scale audience in which to advertise to. We thought this classification would be appropriate as it give us a lot of things to work with without going over film regulations. A main concept to keep in mind was that our trailer features a little girl, therefore we felt that not a severely high level of horror would be put across.

Throughout advertising I have always featured the little girl as my main image, and the film title and logo 'ALICE'. This is because I believe the little girl is our USP within our trailer and is ultimately 'Alice'.  Between my poster and my trailer I think there are many relationships, for example -

• Consistent image of little girl
• Consistent image of film title
• Website
• Dark lighting
• Simple, easy to read texts and fonts
• Appropriate colour scheme
• An enigma - in our trailer I believe the enigma is the past story of the little girl, and in my poster i believe that she is well hidden by the darkness signifying that she is almost 'lost' in the darkness.

The value of getting on a front cover for a film magazine is massively huge for any film distributors as magazines are a highly sellable media source therefore are enabling the film to get noticed. My magazine cover is able to relate to my film poster and trailer in that it again features -

• The little girl
• Consistent colour scheme
• Film title