How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

With any marketing campaign it is important to keep a sense of continuity across all of the media products that are being used to promote the film - so that audiences realise that each text is advertising the same film. A unified campaign helps establish an awareness of the film, almost bombarding the potential audience with constant images associated with the film, so that when they make a choice about what to see at the cinema, the film will be fresh in the audience's minds.

Throughout my campaign I tried to make sure that there were many consistent, unifying elements.

The title font on my teaser trailer and poster, for example, are the same font, making them instantly recognisable as belonging to the same film. When conducting my research I had to be very selective with the font I chose, because I knew I would be using it for both - it had to be effective on both the poster and in the teaser trailer. The font I used is called "Requiem", and I used it on the titles, taglines and the release dates on both my poster and in my teaser trailer.

This means that when the audience are watching the teaser trailer and looking at the poster they can see that they belong to the same film. For the magazine cover, I did not use this font as it needed a completely different font, independent of the film. This is because magazines have their own house style, that is consistent from issue to issue - whilst the film companies may be able to influence which image appears on the front cover of a magazine, it is unlikely that they will persuade the magazine publishers to change the font that they use on their front cover.

   

The tagline used for the poster and the teaser trailer is ‘A Missing Child...A New Beginning’. It is engaging and fearful, and by having the same tagline on the teaser trailer and poster it becomes easy for the audience to associate them together, by sound as well as sight. The tagline doesn’t give away any extensive detail about the plot, but the small hint may make the audience curious and build anticipation. There is no tagline for the magazine cover, however if there was it would not be the same as the film, it would be something that relates to the magazine emphasizing that it is independent from the film.

The main central image used in the poster is not the same as the image I would use on the magazine cover. Magazine covers often have pictures of well known directors, stars or characters (as I discovered when doing my magazine cover research). I used an image of my teacher who I am pretending is Wes Craven, as he is the director of my film (I did not want to use a found image of Craven).

I used the same credits/billing on my poster and my teaser trailer, though the font is different (SteelTongs for the poster and Requiem in the teaser trailer). 

This is because the use of billing/credits is conventional to both media products and there is nothing you can really change about them. They both include the same information. The only thing I did differently was, in the teaser trailer I spaced it out over two shots, where as in the poster I have it all in one paragraph.

The credits/billing, website and company logos are shown over two shots in the trailer. I did not include billing in my magazine as it is not a convention of magazines - instead, they include cover lines related to features or reviews of forthcoming films. The same goes for production company logos which are featured on my trailer and poster but would not appear on the magazine cover. 

The date of release is different on the poster than it is on the trailer. The teaser trailer is very early on in the film's marketing campaign, so it simply states that the film is coming out in ‘Fall 2013’ - this is vague as the distribution company may not have finalised a release date at this point in the campaign. The release date on the poster (which would have come out towards the end of the marketing campaign, after the film has been reviewed) is more specific - giving the actual date of release as October 24th. The magazine’s date is October of 2013, tying in with the release of the film. Coverage of the film in the magazine will act as one final push for the audience, persuading them to go and see the film just ahead of its release.