Karenza Bell A2 Media

The crucial role of the film distributor is to identify their target audience. Once they have done this, they can then build a strong marketing campaign that will hopefully lead to the film being respectfully successful. They do this by estimating revenue potential for all formats and develop plans and partnerships to build awareness about the film. A film distributor also gains the rights to a film to make it available to the public. The promotional techniques they use come from various media platforms, so that the campaign can reach their full target audience. This can include outdoor ads like Billboards and Bus advertisements, TV and cinema ads, web ads and also social media pages like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which has been used more frequently in recent years. However, the role of the distributor doesn't end after the cinematic release, they also need to promote its release through home entertainment (DVD). To do this they use promotional videos and offers from companies, like supermarkets, where they can release exclusive director's cut editions. This type of synergy helps them to make a profit on the film over a long period of time.

The marketing campaign of the film differs depending on the potential audience, which is based on the size of the audience and its demographics. This makes audience research vital in order for the film distributors to make a successful campaign that will apply to the audience they are trying to reach. An example of a successful advertising campaign would be, Finding Dory.

Teaser Poster

Main Poster

Finding Dory (2016), is the computer-animated comedy-drama adventure sequel to Finding Nemo (2003) and was distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. The fact that this film was distributed by Walt Disney tells us that their primary audience would be young children as Walt Disney are famous for creating children's films. Therefore, they had to create a marketing campaign that was appropriate for their desirable demographic. This began with the teaser poster being released in 2015, showing half of Dory's body in the ocean with the tagline, "she just kept swimming", which is Dory's famous catchphrase from the original film. There is a clear uniformed identity between the teaser poster and the main poster. Both posters feature Dory in the bright blue ocean, which is the iconography of the film as they characters are fish, hence why they are in the ocean. The bright and vibrant colours are featured across the all of the posters and trailers, helping them all to link together and therefore once again giving a uniformed identity. Also for the marketing campaign, Ellen DeGeneres, who plays Dory, took part in an extensive Press Junket and did numerous videos for social media pages like Facebook and YouTube. By doing this, the actors were able to interact with their young target audience by taking part in activities and answering their questions. This extensive press tour helped to make the advertising campaign a success and as a result Finding Dory made approximately $135,060,273 in its opening weekend and about $1,028,322,577 overall.

When creating my media product and ancillary texts, I tried to follow similar conventions in order for my products to have a uniformed identity so that it was clear that they are all promoting the same film. However, I did strictly stick to these conventions as I wanted my film to have its own identity and a sense of originality.