The marketing campaign i am going to look at is Paranormal activity as it is a horror film that hugely relates to the style of my film ie. strange goings on in the house, the characters getting haunted ect. The film is part of a prequel and the first film was made by a small italian producer "Oren Peli" shot in his own house. Paramount/Dreamworks then acquired the rights for $350,000.
It is one of the most profitable movies ever made, based on return on investment, although such figuresare difficult to verify independently as this is likely to exclude marketing costs.The first film was released nationwide on 16th October 2009, the second released 22nd October 2010 and the third on October 21st 2011.
The main characters are played by actors who are not well known to the film world Katie Featherstone and Micah Sloat. There names are exactly the same in the film as it is trying to portray it as being real life footage from a noraml couple.
Paranormal activity 1 trailer
Paranormal activity 2 trailer
Paranormal activity 3 trailer
The trailers take a minimalist approach that’s similar to that the approach taken on the poster and uses many of the same elements.
The first trailer opens with a shot of a line waiting to get into a screening of the film, followed by footage of those people having a seat in the theater. Some text is shown telling the audience that the screening was held in Hollywood. The 2nd trailer opens with scenes in the film and the 3rd trailer opens with some scenes that are shown in the film and some that are not.
Enough footage from the movies themselves is shown to give the trailer watching audience a sense of the film’s storyline, how it’s shot and all of those traditional goals it is trying to achieve.
The first trailer features continued shots of the audience showing the people in the theater at this screening and their reactions to the movie. Text is then shown warning to not see the movie alone and, again, to join in and bring the movie to your area via the Demand It campaign.
We the audience are watching another audience watch the movie and are asked to gauge the movie’s impact not so much on how it makes us react but instead on how we see that audience react to it. What the trailer winds up is not so much achieving the goal of making the audience want to see the movie so much as it makes the audience, want to see the movie in a packed theater. Since that’s the whole point of the Demand It portion of the campaign, the trailer taking such a meta approach makes complete sense and is a smart strategy.
Paranormal activity 1 poster
Paranormal activity 2 poster
Paranormal activity 3 poster
All 3 posters lay out three things that are going to be a success.
First, by making the main focus a still from the movie it shows off the look and feel of what the film is about. It makes it clear looking at the strip across the middle of the poster that it’s a story captured by a simple video camera, both from the slightly grainy look of the shot and the time-stamp that appears in the right-hand corner at the bottom of the page.
Second, there is a quote at the top of each poster from either a film review website or the company itself. These are to attract the horror genre lovers that frequently visit these websites for the latest horror genre news and information.
Lastly, the bottom third of the first films poster trys to make the movie an event by getting people involved to bring it to its full potential. The “Demand It” allows people to take an active role in the movie’s campaign and add your voice to the call to bring it to a theater near you. This required people who wanted the film to come to their hometown cinemas to go onto the paranormal activiy website and vote. Once the voting got to 1million the film would then be brought to that area and so on.
Huge amounts of synergy has been used in the marketing of the Paranormal activity films. Shots from the fil itself have been used for all the posters, scenes from the films have been used in all of the trailers and even scenes from the previous film has been used in the trailer for paranormal activity 2. The first two films show a story carrying on from the first to the second. Whereas the second relates back to the reason behind the plot and shows why the girls are haunted so is going back in time. The same font is also used throughout the 3 films trailers and posters and the titles are the exact same.
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