So, what new delights await the bleary-eyed, and by now beleaguered producers of ‘Who Shot The Goose?’ Well, the fact is that their work isn’t but half done. For a start there is the edit to get through. Then the final mix. The grading. The music clearances. And let’s not forget the constant questions and concerns of the money folk and bond company, etc. Then there’s the UK distributor and the international sales company to work alongside, so as to get the eventual release strategy and timing perfect. (And you can bet that these guys will have their own input into the cut if they have sported a brass farthing into the pot upfront.) And last, but certainly not least, there is the little matter of actually being able to deliver the show in some form of industry acceptable shape.

With all the new digital formats, these costs can make your eyes water if you haven’t budgeted for them properly. UK feature editor and post production supervisor Nick McCahearty for the indie thriller St George’s Day, sounds a note of caution about this area when he says there’s,  “Still so much to do! These days all deliverables are not created equal; the emergence of the DCP [Digital Cinema Package]—while a godsend for preserving the pixel-perfect digital facsimile of your hard worked picture and sound—also offers up a bewildering array of compatibility issues for your neighbourhood cinema and distributor. One digital print will work perfectly in one cinema chain but blankly refuse to play in the independent across the street. Delivery now is forged on the ever shifting sands of new formats and technical innovation; years of chemically processed film history have to be digitally re-learned and there is always a price to pay and a budget to balance accordingly!” 

For now, however, the priority is a purely commercial one. Once everybody is satisfied that the cut is about right, it’s probably time to call in a bunch of strangers from off the street to confirm that the cut is nearly right. OK, so market research is an inexact half science at best. But it can serve a precious purpose, in that it does help to eliminate excess marketing activity being aimed at the wrong customers. 

In distribution terms—and for the players that can afford it—this element of the analysis is as critical to the eventual marketing push, and subsequently the release strategy, as the poster, trailer and publicity themselves. Zoe Lewis, Managing Director of leading media research company First Movies, opines a more measured take on the process. “Market intelligence has become an invaluable tool in film distribution and marketing. Long gone are the days when research was solely used to test features for scorecard responses. Research screening a film at an early stage of post-production is still used to fine tune the finished feature, but as the media outlets available to distributors become more and more sophisticated so must the campaigns”  “The world has changed,” Lewis continues, “Imagine, trying to foresee that smart phone technology would be the primary delivery method of trailers, even five years ago! In order to maximize the reach of a film, campaign distributors can no longer afford to adopt a shotgun approach to marketing—a few years ago if you could afford it a 30 second TV spot in the centre break of Coronation Street it was considered to be perfect marketing for a blockbuster! Now, by using research, campaigns often become the sniper, picking off individual groups to create earlier word of mouth through carefully tuned media buying.”

In the case of our film, on the back of these results the distributor is excited as the key cinema exhibition players like it and, on top of that, the market research is telling them that ‘Who Shot the Goose?’ is playing really strongly to the 16—24 male market of primary multiplex users, a basic no-nonsense, popcorn crowd. The market research value now kicks in big time and the distributor can use their nous to engage the services of a dedicated marketing house to target market the common herd. 

Mike Devry, Managing Director of The Creative Partnership, considers the changes that the past few years have wrought. “Twenty years ago, ‘movie marketing’ was shorthand for trailer and poster making. In these digital days, as in all forms of consumer marketing, the range of possible ways to talk to your audience grows daily. But no matter the proliferation of channels and changing patterns of consumer behaviour, our core purpose has never changed.

“Our creative process is informed by the client brief, market research and the opportunities or problems presented by release dates. From there, the creative tools at our disposal are extensive but will be chosen to best match the requirements of the client and behaviours of our audience. From AV to print and digital, the marketing mix can be refined and targeted like never before”

So, ‘Who Shot the Goose?’ now has real momentum; all we need now is the right opening date. Roy Gower, Head of Film Buying at the UK’s leading cinema chain Cineworld, helps us understand the thought processes behind choosing the right date. “Selecting the right release date is actually a real skill in itself, as every week there is anything from five to 10 new films being released and they are all fighting for screen space. That makes it a very tough market anyway, and the last thing a distributor, or indeed a major cinema circuit such as Cineworld, want to do is potentially undermine a good film by swamping it with other product. For independent films in particular we try really hard to help when we can by utilising the available trailers, posters, promotions at the dated cinemas. But it has to be remembered that there is a hell of a lot of call for this important point of sale activity from all the UK distribution companies on all their product. Clearly, we can only do what we can.”

Running alongside all of this activity is a dedicated and time sensitive PR campaign that will hopefully get our movie off the film pages and into the general editorial areas online, on-page and on TV. Film PR veteran Wendy Kidd has more than 20 years’ experience working on a wide range of films from mega blockbusters like the Harry Potter series to such indie hits as Peter Mullan’s NEDS. “There is no such thing as a critic-proof film or film maker so the ad-pub campaign has a big part to play in a film’s success or otherwise,” she says. “You need to give your film as much help as possible, so that it can find its audience in a crowded market. Covering the bases is essential if you are not to have your little diamond covered in a ton of negative horse manure from the national critic corps.”

Interestingly, on the international sales front the dynamic is markedly different. Gary Hamilton, CEO of Arclight Films, explains, “There is a very real difference in the dynamic of marketing a film to a domestic distribution company at one of the international film markets, and the subsequent marketing that those distributors then incorporate when marketing to the consumers in their own territory. In many instances they will not use the imagery and campaign that they have responded to when buying a film from us, because tastes and cultures differ so wildly from one country to another. With what I do, I have a small amount of time to make a big amount of impact on the buyers. Communication of stars, genre, quality of script, etc., is about pre-market communication with the targeted distribution outfits we see as right for any given title.” 

So how does a distributor decide how to spend their advertising bucks? Over to Rob Wilkerson, Managing Director of Target, expert UK media buyers for the distribution industry. “Evidently, we are in the middle of a seismic shift in the way media is consumed and this is having a major influence on distributor spend patterns—or should be. The growth in digital marketing channels has exponentially multiplied the communication channels and created a need to integrate the thinking and implementation across marketing disciplines such as primary media planning, film PR, social media and search marketing.” 

“The starting point of any advertising campaign is to clearly define the audience, not just in terms of demography but also through analysis of behavioural characteristics. There can be enormous differences between cinemagoers who happen to share an age bracket but little else. It is a major mistake to pigeon-hole based on obvious attributes—it’s much more about communities than demographics.”

Companies such as Target have witnessed significant shifts in the way these audiences can be reached and, with the newfound measurability of digital media tracking, this is beginning to impact on how distributors apportion any promotional spend. Wilkerson adds, “We can clearly ‘see’ the film user journey—what sites they visit, what content they most consume, how long they spend browsing, their purchasing preferences. So we are able to serve advertising that is directly relevant and measure which creative treatments produce the highest engagement levels.”  

Although traditional channels are still effective for marketing, the Holy Grail for film advertisers today is securing ‘punter’ engagement; asking audiences to interact with our content because we have prequalified their interest already. The landscape continues to shift and what was effective this time last year does not necessarily deliver the same results this year so, naturally, the pressure is on distributors to constantly challenge conventional thinking. 

As our film’s release date looms, the national critics are surprisingly kind given the overt commercial nature of the material and the marketing and publicity campaign rocks. It looks sure as hell as though the producers will have a hit on their hands as the opening Friday approaches. Then on Friday morning… the sun comes out for the first time that year. The whole nation hits the parks, the pools or pubs; nobody goes inside for the entire weekend. You see, it’s the ‘best-laid plans of mice and men’ syndrome. You do everything right, but something nasty hits you in the face when you least expected it. In the UK, warm weather will pretty much kill any film over the first three days. Distributors, exhibitors and producers live in mortal fear of the first hot days of sunshine. 

So there you have it. There is no real moral to this whimsy. If one can take a crumb of comfort at all from the salutary tale, it is the fact that many a small acorn of a theatrical mishap has grown into a mighty oak through the fertile soil of decent international sales and a direct hit courtesy of DVD, VOD and a half decent TV deal. All is not lost.