Deliver The Marketing Promise

I saw this quote in an LA times article about the failure of celebrity driven movies to deliver box office returns this summer:

“Movie stars still hold an incredible value both creatively and financially,” said “Hangover” director Todd Phillips. “But it’s getting to be more about the movie and whether it delivers on the promise of its trailers and commercials.”

In that quote is an invaluable lesson in the marketing of movies and television: Marketing is a promise to the consumer. Consistently delivering on the promise keeps them coming back for more. Fail to keep the promise and they’ll hang you for it.

Every decision that goes into a production, any kind of production, is a marketing decision. In the overcrowded mediascape, marketable elements have to be built into the production from the ground up, starting in the development phase. The nature of those marketable elements will depend on the product at hand, but the very core existence of a product has to be fascinating to the intended audience, other wise that audience will never even find it.

If those elements are in place, and well executed, the marketing and advertising should be relatively straight forward. The trouble comes when the marketing team misunderstands the marketable elements of a product, and takes the message in a different direction. This leads to a schism between the voice of the marketing and the content of the product, and that never ends well.

I spent years marketing TV shows in the form of network promos. Now I find myself trying to unlearn much of what I was taught 15 years ago. I was trained how to use dynamic editing and copy writing to create a hook for entertainment products that had no hook of their own. There were long meetings and hours of revisions to make a promo feel glitzier, sexier, and more exploitative. It didn’t matter if the show would never live up to those expectations. That was the programming department’s problem.

These days I work on the marketing for movies and TV shows that I also produce and distribute. I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t use those old TV promo tricks to build marketable elements into a production after the fact. The media savvy audience always knows when we’re bullshitting, and they hang us for it every time.