At the start of May I went to an event about movie trailers. For an ad person that's obsessed with film it was a perfect opportunity to indulge in two of my favourite things at the same time whilst feeling like all my Christmases had come at once (I know, I need to get a life).
It was hosted by Turner Classic Movies, who have various movie channels all over the world and an extremely loyal fan following in the US particularly. The UK channel is a poorer shadow of its American parent, but the schedules still far outweigh most of the other dross you get on the tellybox over here.
The event itself was hosted by a panel of experts. People band the word "expert" around like sweeties, but this panel was seriously serious stuff. There was significant marketing presence going on on the stage:
- Terry Press, the ex-marketing chief of DreamWorks who has been in the trailer business for over two decades.
- Benedict Coulter, the founder of the outrageously successful Trailerpark, who has worked on stuff like Avatar..
- David Sameth, the Senior Vice President of marketing at a little back water company called Walt Disney.
- Lastly, Michelle Jackino, the Executive Creative Director at the Ant Farm, who has Gladiator, Rango and American Beauty under her belt, amongst countless others.
We are not talking chicken feed here. To say I wanted their jobs with waaaaaay less responsibility (but current salaries) is an understatement.
Unfortunately, the reality of the situation was a bit less impressive than the panel's collective CV. I was really looking forward to learning some cool stuff about the marketing of movies, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed.
It's not that the event was bad, it just that ironically I don't think the panel knew who their target audience was. The auditorium was rammed with massive classic film fans (their fandom, not gigantism) that wanted to learn about the history of trailers and the format of them before today's slick marketing execs got their mitts involved, but instead the panel discussed topics like their favourite trailers and that the most common complaint they hear is that their work gives too much of the movie away.
As a marketeer I was looking forward to some marketing chat about how movies are rolled out, but failing that (as it was an event for the general public) as a classic film fan I was desperately keen to learn more of the history of trailers. It's such a shame that neither of these points were fully addressed and instead the panel was given free rein to chat amongst themselves.
So I can't really report on any juicy marketing insights. I can give you the trailer 101 chat e.g. targeting trailers to the correct demographic, editing it well and using a great soundtrack, but this is stuff we already know so nothing new there.
On a more positive note here are a couple of my all time favourite trailers. The Alien one in particular is near perfect. I think Benedict Coulter may have even worked on the Jurassic Park trailer as that's one of the notches on his employment bedpost (so he gets extra thumbs up).
There's a better quality version but embedding has been disabled by request, so you'll need to clickety click.
If you want to see what the panel showed as their examples of brilliant movies trailers, here they are:
Black Hawk Down
What Lies Beneath
V For Vendetta
Genius? Good? Guff? (I think my picks are better...)
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