Marketing Work

Plan of Action

Our first plan of action was finding our target audience. Since our film was a documentary about the environment we figured some of our target audience would include anyone who was interested in the environment, documentaries/indie films, democrats, and science teachers.

Due to the subject of our film, we decided that we probably shouldn’t distribute flyers that promoted our film about the environment so instead we attempted an online marketing campaign. We decided to market this way because since our main focus was environmentalists, and paper flyering would be wasteful and potentially harmful to our environment.

Were you successful in attracting interest? Did you get butts in the seats?

This online campaign was most challenging because sending emails is not as effective as handing out flyers. Flyers have brief information that people can take with them and look at and keep with them. They are all so are more approachable, when you are handing out flyer you can also talk to people as opposed to emails where most people ignore them, delete, them or just send it to a spam folder. For our first screening we got about 44 people out of 70 seats, and on the second screening about 49.

Both theaters were pretty small but it seemed like a good majority were there. Because our group never received any material and the filmmaker had never sent anything to the film festival, we could only rely on these emailing techniques. As well, since the film already has some prior distribution the filmmaker was not too helpful when it came to marketing the film, yet for what little marketing help we got it seems like we did get more than we expected to in the theaters.

Describe in detail what each team member actually did. How did it work?

Addison’s Role:

• In charge of contacting the filmmaker and production company about our plan of attack.
• Contacted environmental groups in the area and requested to be included in their newsletter.
• Promoted the film in most fraternity and sorority chapters.
• Invited over 1300 friends to the facebook event.
• Created Myspace page

Nicole’s Role:

• Sent out emails about the film to our target audience.
• Created Facebook Event and sent invites to friends and family
• Promoted film at Eco Advocates Meeting
• Created and sent out E-vites.

Hector’s Role:

• Sent invites to the premier through facebook
• Created a gmail account for the film for contact purposes
• Edited the materials that were emailed from the production company, so contacts had screening information to spread the news
• Pestered the our contacts with emails by forwarding them once every couple of days
Successes and Failures

Just like every other group the Facebook event was a failure. Over a thousand people were invited and only 14 confirmed they were going and most of those people still didn’t go see the film. The emails were not as successful either because again, emails are not as personable as flyers. Thus, assuming since we only heard back from one person, most people probably just deleted our emails. However, we did get our film’s show times posted on The Unifying Theme and Environmental Stability for UCF websites’ event calendar.

We had a bad show times (6:30pm on a Tuesday night) for our second screening and had awful weather. Not to mention we had a terrible aspect ratio during the showing where at part the images of the earth looked like an egg.

We did not receive any promotional materials except images online. Even at both the Regal and Enzian there were tables filled with postcard of all the films in the festival and there was no postcards, posters, or anything about our film. Therefore, the filmmaker didn’t even send the festival any materials for the film either. But despite this Hector made some promotional images for us to use to send out through emails.

Since we wanted to be more earth friendly and not do the flyering that set us back a little. Instead of the flyers we had some ideas on what we could have done instead which included: doing more word of mouth guerilla marketing outside of the theater and the union, dress in hippie garb and flash recycled cardboard signs, promoting the film, and maybe write our show times on recycled pieces of paper. However, we thought of these things after the festival was over.