Interview Results. To understand all aspects of American film promotion an interview with Karina Mejia, Head of the 20th Century Fox Promotion

To understand all aspects of American film promotion an interview with Karina Mejia, Head of the 20^th Century Fox Promotion, was conducted. The main purpose of the interview was to get the experts opinion on film promotion in the USA.

Mejia has been working as Head of the 20^th Century Fox Promotion for more than 20 years. She thinks that the American film promotion became more complex and used more widely in the last five years because film audiences are more selective in what they want to see. 20^th Century Fox is recruiting new staff to work in promotion.

Promotion is really important for the film industry because it is necessary to attract as much audiences as possible to make films popular and profitable. The company spared no expense to run promotional campaigns.

For example, in 2013 they run campaigns for The Croods, The Heat, The Wolverine, Epic, Turbo, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Internship and others. Mejia as top manager headed all promotion campaigns for these films.

The most widely used strategies, in general, are release and post-release. In her experience pre-release strategies are expensive and not necessary. Among widely used promotional tools she named trailers, posters, billboards, print media advertising, television advertising, Internet and merchandising. She stressed the importance of Internet advertisements.

She used Avatar as example for good promotion campaign. The cost was more than $90 million and a team of more than one hundred people made up the promotion campaign. They prepared release strategy for two month before the release date and started the post-release strategy immediately after the premiere.

Among risks to the promotion campaign lack of finance and experienced employees were mentioned. Too much emphasis is placed on resources to make the film but not enough on marketing, therefore the studio will work with two budgets in the near future, one for the film itself the other for marketing and promotion.

She agrees with the release and post-release strategies being the most important in promotion which is underpinned by current research. She also values monitoring customers in creating promotion campaigns which they do by frequent surveys. She also recognized the value of social media advertising at the suggestion of the author of the dissertation.

In conclusion she added that she sees promotion being one of the most important elements in the film industry which will employ young, creative personnel to popularise films with the help of the Internet.

J.J. Abrams, director and screenwriter, who currently works on Star Wars: Episode VII also put forward his opinion about the research. He agrees with the importance of merchandising in the post-release strategy which will appear in the forms of theme parks in the Disneyland franchise on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Russian Film Promotion

Secondary Research

Russian film industry experienced difficult times after the collapse of Soviet Union. Beforehand it was a powerful industry supported by the government. Nowadays the Russian government employs a policy of favoritism in deciding which films to support. Small film companies have no financial or human resources big enough to make their films and promote them.

Russian box office is potentially huge but not to the scale of the American box office (Plakhov, 2012). There are no effective promotion campaigns in Russia and there is a lack of government support. According to Duvernet (2012) a solution to this problem could be foreign film promotion, such as Cannes and Berlin.

American sources emphasised the importance of post-release strategies, while in Russia the most widely used promotional tools are word-of-mouth advertisement and the Internet. Examples to support this are reviews of BadComedian on YouTube which had more than 900 thousand views or Dmitry Puchkov’s personal website which had more than 500 thousand views daily.

To understand the success rate of Russian films in comparison with American films a handy example is that Christmas Trees 3 most profitable Russian film in 2013 earned $38 million, while its competitor The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug earned $44 million in Russia alone.

Survey Results

The purpose of the survey was to identify the most popular release and post-release strategies in the film promotion among moviegoers in Russia. The questionnaire was posted on the most popular website Kinopisk.ru. One hundred people returned it, some with useful comments, for example, Eugene Bazhenov, creator of the popular show BadComedian on YouTube, who gave additional information to the author.

66% men and 34% women replied. The age range was 9% between 12-17, 29% between 18-24, 28% between 25-34, 14% between 35-44, 12% between 45-54 and 8% over 54. 71% live in big cities, such as Moscow, Saint-Petersburg and Novosibirsk, 24% in small towns, for example Irkutsk, Mytischi and Kaliningrad and 5% from villages located near cities and towns, for example Pushkino, Zelenograd and Balakovo.

Chart 4. Gender distribution of the survey (Russia) Chart 5. Age distribution of the survey (Russia)

61% said they watched one to two domestic films in the last three months, 29% watched three to five films in the last three months and 10% saw more than six in the period.

55% think that film marketing in Russia is weak and they pay no attention to domestic promotion campaigns. 11% of respondents disagreed and 34% remained neutral.

Famous actors and actresses attract 9% of people and film director attracts only 7%. Interesting storylines attract 37% and trailers 47%. This statistics demonstrate the importance of film promotion at the stage of release.

The most common way to find information about new films is the Internet according to 76%, television according to 15%, cinema promotion according to 6% and magazines and journals according to 3%.

Chart 6. Common ways to find information about new films among moviegoers (Russia)

Among all proposed promotion tools 39% voted for word-of-mouth, 35% for social media, 18% for television, 5% for radio and 3% for posters and billboards. There were comments that some people prefer to see new trailers and teasers in breaks between football matches.

20% bought DVDs and Blu-rays of Russian films. Among them 65% were over 25 years old, while 80% do not buy DVDs and Blu-rays and 93% of them were under 24 years. 50% of participants bought American films on DVDs and Blu-rays.

93% answered that they watched films on the Internet and social media websites and downloaded films via Torrent client. 64% were under 24 years.

9% answered that they bought merchandise associated with their favourite films, while 91% said that they did not.

95% of Russian moviegoers agreed they wanted to see promotion campaigns or take part in competitions with winning opportunities. The ones, who did not, were over 45.

Eugene Bazhenov who is a 25 year old professional film critic and sees at least six films every two month agrees that promotion campaigns contribute to box office success of films. The weakness of the Russian film industry is not to place importance to this. Bazhenov is not fan of Russian films therefore he never buys any on DVD but he has an extensive foreign film collection. In his opinion, the primary problem of the Russian film industry is not the lack of promotion but the lack of professionals making the film.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-23