Evaluation - Question 5

How did you attract/address your Audience?

To promote our film, a variety of marketing techniques would be used. We thought about misé en scene and the power of the visual image. This is because stills of zombies, especially shots with violence in the misé en scene show exactly what the film is about, and would look really good on posters and other marketing mediums.

The ideal way to run the marketing campaign would be to use a combination of viral and standard marketing, with a preference toward the former. This has been used to great success in the marketing of independent films, such as Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s Blair Witch Project (1999).

We would start the marketing campaign by releasing a small video clip on the internet, in the form of a news report with no writing or logos that suggest it was a film. This would be posted on a third-party, such as on a well-known social networking site. This would be followed up with a specialist website, devoted to reporting the zombie “outbreak”. This information would spread through the internet like a virus, gathering more and more interest and coverage from more established websites and social news websites, like Digg. This pretence that the outbreak was real would be the centre of the marketing campaign, and would allow for more avenues of marketing to be used. Handing out fake newspaper reports to passersby on the streets after film screenings would raise interest. This whole process of allowing a product to market itself by word of mouth is known as “Viral Marketing”. This is because the adverts for the product and associated ideas spread like a virus around the internet and other mediums, transferred from one person to another through conversation, or from website to website by emails or “posts”.
After the awareness raised by the viral marketing, the standard marketing would finally begin to roll into action. Dominant stills form the film, such as zombies arms reaching for one of the girls would be released as teaser posters, featuring a tagline. Simultaneously with this, teaser trailers would be released. Then theatrical trailers and posters would be put up around the towns and cities where the film was going to be screened. The viral marketing could be continued here, by making one of theatrical posters a poster with just the word “Quarantine” stamped on it in block capitals, with instructions for “survivors” of the infection. An idea to target our specific audience of 15-25 year old males would be to advertise in pubs. Ideas such as posters above urinals, and urinal cakes which show a picture when urinated on have been used by British films in the past, for example Lesbian Vampire Killers (2009). This is a good marketing technique, as it guarantees the right type of people will view the marketing. Also, after view the marketing, the people will go and talk to their friends about it, as people discuss things in a pub, this makes more people aware of the product, as is the goal of viral marketing.