Regardless of your eventual distribution strategy, consider parsing time and funds from your festival strategy, and allocate those resources for an outreach strategy. Building awareness is fundamental to any film, especially nowadays when offers–whether good or unfavorable–are difficult to obtain. Building an audience database provides you options, since it is less likely that one distributor can cover effectively all possible sales channels. We see many filmmakers employ a multi-distribution strategy where different rights are sold through different distributors or agents, or by the filmmaker themselves. (References to Peter Broderick’s hybrid model are very appropriate.) For example, a sales agent for foreign markets, a DVD distributor for retail, and self-distribution for the DVDs to the private home use and the institutional markets via your own website. In the latter channels, building your audience database is crucial for its success.
An outreach strategy should encompass these goals:
[1] Create general awareness about the film (or project) to build a feed-back loop between the audience (or potential audience) and you;
[2] Collect the e-mail address from people want to elevate the relationship from being “aware” of your film to become your fan or a fan of the film/project;
[3] Build affiliations with organizations that can help with (a) spreading the word, (b) obtaining funding/donations, and/or (c) selling DVDs or other revenue generation activities.
Examples of outreach activities:
1. Blogging – consider doing this at least once per week.
2. Posting trailers and clips on popular sites like YouTube
3. Cold-calling or emailing relevant organizations, academic departments, and reporters to offer them an opportunity to interview you and/or screening your film.
(a) Essential Internet and Web 2.0 tools.
A couple years back, Brian Olson wrote a piece called “Audience Development Tools: Ten for $10?. Those suggestions are still relevant, so rather than repeat those, I am referencing his suggestions. (http://diyflix.com/2008/02/13/audience-development-tools-ten-for-10/)
To maximize on your outreach efforts, first make sure your Internet and website infrastructure is setup to do the heavy-lifting that will occur over many months or years. (a) Websites. Consider using content management systems or also known as “blog sites” (e.g. WordPress). You may still need a web designer to customize the site, but a CMS allows you to easily update and manage the content on your website. This is crucial in continuously attracting new, and keeping existing, audience from an outreach campaign. This is an example of a site built on a CMS structure: http://beerwarsmovie.com/.
–Note the easy links by which your potential audience may sign-up to various Web 2.0 applications to deploy links or share your website with their social network at sites like Facebook or Myspace.
(b) E-mail capture and management.
This is not the same as an email form, like the one on the “Contact” page of your website, where inquiries are sent to your email. Over time, these emails may be lost, or the labor involved in copying/pasting addresses from individual emails into a database will take many hours. (As a metric, one clients hired an intern three weeks to capture 3000 email addresses.) I recommend that you add on your home page a sign-up form application that captures the e-mails into a database that can later be retrieved as a.csv or text files. There are several free applications out there, and you want to find one that has unlimited number of subscribers without monthly fees. Examples include PHP List (http://www.phplist.com/) and Box Office Widget (mentioned in Brian’s article. Disclaimer: this is an application that was built by Magic Rock, parent company to diyflix.com and Neoflix).
(c) Trailers and clips.
If you post multiple trailers and short clips on sites like YouTube, include the movie’s website address in a watermark that loops in the top or bottom of the window to help drive the traffic to your website. At the very minimum, include the URL at the beginning and end of the trailer. This way, if someone reposts your video, the film’s website address follows it. A few filmmakers told me that their trailers on YouTube were reposted, without referencing the name of the film or the website. Some of these reposts unfortunately had many more hits then their original site. That represents loss opportunity at several levels. Here is an example where a client’’s “official” video on YouTube that was outpaced by copycats: 500,000 versus 63,000 (yes, 8 to 1):
–The “official” trailer that our client posted on YouTube received 63,000 views. The movie’s website appears in the info box without the user clicking on the small “info box”, and at the end of the trailer. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWfcATXnBLs
–Reposts of the trailer received over 500,000 views. Notice that the the film’s website is not visible unless you click on the small “more info” box to the right, or until the very end of the trailer:
-425,000 views, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OADmYiqwlvI (This copycat received 425,000 views, and does not mention the film’s website at all!)
-41,000 views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nnB42yX-kA
-33,000 views: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCrqi8WuGug
(d) Comment about manufacturing and selling DVDs at festivals or screenings.
From anecdotal stories provided by clients whom have sold DVDs after screenings at festivals, speaking engagements or other events, they estimate between 10-15% of the audience requested to buy a DVD. Several clients have said that in smaller screenings with less than 30 people, that number can be as high as 50%. Most festivals, as a policy, would not accept films entries that are available for sale. However, I would be curious to know if they enforce this rule, and what filmmakers are experiencing. In 2006, many clients said they wouldn’t sell DVDs during the festival period; however, in 2009, we do not hear that thinking espoused. Perhaps, with the best known film festivals, that rule will endure since that’s where the major deals get done. At smaller festivals we know a few filmmakers are using those events as awareness-building opportunities to drive traffic to the film’s website, and selling DVDs during festival runs (perhaps not at the festival itself) has become increasingly popular strategy.
You must log in to post a comment.