How by Doing TV interviews and social media you can bring positives and negatives for the film premiere?
The TV people are obsessed with NEW and unseen stories. Of course the first thing which can come across our minds is how could be possible by doing interviews and social media campaigns to bring any negatives. It's possible for the end result, because I experienced it and because the timing is everything in distribution and marketing and that you got one shot when doing a film campaign so strategy and the timing is so crucial for a successful campaign.
However, We did two media campaigns. The first one was dedicated to our film national premiere on 3th of June 2016 and the second was April 2017 for the film's official national theatrical release. So basically we did something which nobody has done before.
It has lots of positives especially when we are talking about a micro budget film, every exposure of the film to the audience's attention is a bonus and a positive. However to convert the interest and attention into action, an actual audience who eventually would go and pay to see the film is a completely different story.
This is what I found out, popularity doesn't secure conversion and vise versa. That's why I emphasize so much on the timing and schedule of the campaigns. We were lucky that our PR's Vera and later on Mihail Vuchkov who was running the second more difficult campaign were great professionals with a really powerful network of people in the media. However, Mihail had big problems securing any interviews in the biggest shows, because we already had been there talking with them and showing our trailer. What I found was that for a micro budget film the step by step releasing of content is probably not the best approach. As we did in our social media campaign on the internet. Where we gradually were releasing teasers, trailers, images, posters, interviews, tv spots, music clips, BTS material through a duration of three years. Probably for a big budget feature film this approach would work very well, or for a film with a very well known director or actors, or even more for a TV drama Series. However, for a micro budget this way of communication doesn't work.
It doesn't work, because people who are once teased and hooked, people who might be going and wanting to see your film in cinema, who would crave its content and story need to be satisfied IMMEDIATELY. I noticed that the interest and mostly interactions and response towards our facebook posts gradually decreased with time and unfortunately we hit the lowest momentum while we were going to release the film. I might say that a big role in this failure is the National Film Center, because we had to wait for 7 months to receive only 5 000 euros from the applied 20 000 euro, which were needed to cover the distribution taxes and fees and the distribution company services, plus all of the expenses for the campaign. We weren't able to plan exactly the date of the release and we postponed it for 7 months because of that.
Anyhow, my conclusion is that for a micro budget film, a very short, powerful and focused media campaign, could be much more effective and the conversion rates would be much higher if it is done not more than one month before the film premiere.
UPDATES 2020 - YATAGAN
Yatagan's marketing campaign was 85% publicity. This time there were more than twenty Tv Interviews with the cast and the director.
The campaign started around 4-5 months before the official premiere, and my theory is confirmed again that this doesn't work.
Unfortunately, we did not have big budget for marketing so we couldn't push the movie as much as I wanted the last month before the premiere. So We couldn't promote the movie as much as it deserved.
Despite that, the movie started to pick up after the first week being on screen but then the Covid -19 appeared and everything is a HISTORY now.
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