Initial Research Into Film Promotional Campaigns - George

The Avengers 

“The Avengers” was a film with a huge advertising campaign. It was released in the UK on the 26th of April. Yet before the film was released, teaser and full posters were used, as well as trailers and magazine promotions in order to help promote the film. The film’s premier was held on the 19th of April.

 As is the case with many other film campaigns, it all begins with the release of teaser posters. The first Avengers teaser poster was simply the avenger logo, this supplied little information yet allowed viewers to know that the film is to be released soon. This technique of mystery can only be used if the story or characters are familiar to lots of people, which in this case it is with films already made about characters such as 'Iron Man', 'Thor' and 'Captain America'. Even for those who were not familiar with the comic books or other films, there was swiftly a big internet buzz about this film making it easy for anyone to find out. 

Eventually the full 'Avengers' poster was released.

This supplied the audience with a lot more information. Within this poster we see 'Iron Man' standing at the front of the poster. This causes the reader to presume that he has adopted a more dominant role. Then behind 'Iron Man' we see the remainder of the Avengers. Each of them are standing in an action type pose which is a common occurrence in film promotional campaigns as they wish to catch the reader’s attention. It also establishes one of the key settings within the film – a big city, which is conventional for the genre. Generally, the aim of the full poster is to supply the audience with key information prior to the film’s release. It must also contain the billing block seen at the bottom for legal reasons.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1hPpG4s3-O4

The trailer includes a very high quantity of action shots, which of course grabs the viewer’s attention and promises them that this film will deliver on action and thrills. It also displays each character individually throughout to supply a basis of information about who they are and what they are seeking to do. This means that for any fan who has a favourite, there will be a some screen time for this character to reassure the audience that they are important to this film. This is achieved mainly through diegetic dialogue. Much of the screen time is given to the character 'Iron Man' as it seems that he has a somewhat dominant role in the film and might be seen as the ‘main’ character. Yet there are parts of the trailer which are fixated on establishing setting and other locations. In general it is clear that the trailer is set out to establish a genre, setting and in particular, a description of the characters and action.

As a promotional campaign, I can see how this was thought out. This was an easy film to promote in lots of ways because it had an established target audience already. Really all that was needed was to alert this audience that the film was coming out and leave them to do the rest themselves with chat and discussion on the internet. There are many versions of the trailer on YouTube, for example, and all with an extraordinary number of views and lots of comments left. It is easy to see that this campaign was simply based around alerting audiences to the fact that the film was being made in the teaser stage, then allowing them glimpses of the different characters involved to catch fans with more specific tastes.

Promoting a film that does not have an established audience must be much more difficult, and I imagine that is the reason why the most elaborate campaigns are created by the bog successful franchises. It is a lot of money to spend if there is not a good chance of success.