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From painting posters on walls to Google Hangouts with fans, film marketing has come a long way. Today, promoting a film is not restricted to having a theatrical promo, followed by plastering the cities' landscape with hoardings and trailers on the telly. Film-makers and marketers want to reach out to their audience and engage them in conversations around their films. They do not only want to be seen and heard, they want to hear their viewers as well.
For quite some time, Bollywood celebrities have been making 'special' appearances on popular TV shows to promote their films. The increased use of this tactic has made certain stars regulars on the small screen, raising the question whether the innovation is innovative anymore.
Tanuj Garg, CEO, Balaji Motion Pictures, says, "While it has become a very regular practice to have celebrities on television shows, I would not say that it has become mundane. The trick is how the film promoters and the show's creative team incorporate the entry of the film actors. If the integration is done intelligently, it will result in good recall for the film and increased ratings for the show." Rather than just foist a star on a TV show, branding teams are weaving the actors into TV programme's plot.
Apart from becoming a cliched tactic, television is also a very expensive medium. Marketers are now exploring more cost-effective avenues to promote their wares. While on-ground activations in malls and multiplexes are an option, it is the digital space that has caught the fancy of the film promoters.
Digital is fast becoming the medium where the youth, which forms a chunk of the audience for movies, is present. With the increase in use of dual screens (usually television and laptop/mobile), marketers now have more scope to attract, engage and impress this core target group.
"The viral nature of digital makes it very cost effective giving promoters more bang for their buck," says Prabhat Choudhary, head, Spice PR, who has marketed films on digital. UTV Motion Pictures (UTV) created an app for the movie Barfi! on Youtube where people could animate Ranbir Kapoor any which way. The app went viral, garnering over 2.5 lakh users in two weeks with Google India terming it as one of the best online innovations done on You Tube in the past year and a half.
Digital also gives film promoters the chance to get almost instant feedback on their campaigns which makes it easier to modify the strategy.
An example from recent times is Kiran Rao's The Ship of Theseus where the studio, UTV, used its presence on Facebook to interact with the audience and plan the movie's geographical release strategy. Being a film for niche audiences, the movie was to be released only in five cities - Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Kolkata, Pune and Bengaluru. The Facebook page ran a campaign called 'Vote for your city' where visitors had to vote their cities to get the film released in them. As a result, Hyderabad has been added to the list of destinations for screening the movie.
For the upcoming mainstream movie, Chennai Express, UTV crowd-sourced the trailer launch to fans. The more they tweeted, the more the trailer was brought forward for release. In fact, the trailer was first shown online, hours before Shah Rukh Khan, Deepika Padukone and director Rohit Shetty unveiled it at a press conference.
Shikha Kapur, executive director - marketing (studios), Disney UTV explains, "Today, film marketing has become more scientific and hence, there is more scope for flexibility.
So now, we rely on a mix of gut, passion and method to plan our campaigns. We have the leverage of integrating the feedback we receive from our audience into our strategy almost instantly."
Another reason for the thrust on digital by marketers is that conversations flow freely on the medium. Choudhary explains that people, especially youngsters, love to discuss movies on the platform. This lets the producers/studios enter the conversations and engage at an involved level with the consumer.
This has led studios to release the first look of their films on platforms like Facebook or YouTube, a trend that started with Excel Entertainment's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.
These conversations are not limited to people from metros, but are spread across the landscape of the country (or even the globe) giving a wide exposure. This translates to much better returns on investment.
According to the FICCI-KPMG Frames 2013 report, the film marketing costs ranged between Rs 8 crore and Rs 12 crore. For high budget films, this goes up to Rs 15 crore and for low budget films, it can exceed the production cost, at Rs 3.5-5 crore.
While television still continues to hog a major chunk of the marketing pie, digital has grown steadily. According to industry estimates, what used to be two to four per cent of the the marketing spend around five years back, now commands as much as 10 to 12 per cent share in a film marketing budget.
Digital has come as a boon to the makers of non-formula, non-star driven films as it gives them more scope to experiment around theme of the movie, and at the same time keep the campaign spend in the nominal range. In such cases, up to 50 to 60 per cent of the marketing budget could be dedicated towards digital.
