Movie trailers are in the enviable position of being a marketing tool that, by and large, do not raise the ire of the people consuming the marketing. Unlike so much advertising, PR press releases, and other marketing materials, people accept trailers as a part of life in a way that they seem unwilling to do with other forms of promotion. Sure, people seek out the best super bowl ads each year to see the best work that top creative agencies in America have to offer, but that is a once a year occurrence. People seek out trailers all year round to keep appraised of new movies they might want to watch. Trailers get traded around on social media in a way that most digital marketers can only dream about. And this flow of marketing happens in that egalitarian way only the Internet can allow. Big franchise films obviously get a lot of attention from their established fan-bases, but I’ve seen plenty of hype build up on social networks about oddball high-concept fantasies like Cloud Atlas or independent emotional dramas like Little Miss Sunshine or The Way Way Back. Despite the fact that trailers have all of this going for them, the system has its flaws. Since this form of promotion relies heavily on excerpting material from the original source, it should be no surprise that most trailers are as good or as bad as the film they are promoting. But not all. There are, of course, trailers made by true artists of the form that make a movie look way better than it actually is, and there are total duds that make an awesome movie look like a waste of time, but there is a third, peculiar category that makes movies look like something completely different from what they are. It is in examining this third category that we can draw parallels to the foibles of other mainstream marketing.
Movie trailers are a bit of an oddity as a marketing tool. The product they market is very different than most. Traditional marketing often wants to promote a product line and the company that makes it. In the movie business there is no product line, the only product is the film itself, and there is no company, movies are made by teams that form and disband for every project. A brand like Charmin can develop a prototype, bring it to market, and then continue to develop on that original idea over many iterations. That’s how we get Charmin Ultra Strong, Ultra Soft, Basic and Sensitive. Movies, on the other hand, only have the prototype. Even the follow-on ideas, the sequel or the franchise, are not new iterations on established ground but entirely new creative endeavors, with new plots, new locations, and so on. Despite this, trailers aim to do the same thing corporate marketing campaigns do: show the best aspects of a product so consumers will spend money on it. An out of vogue term for this approach, coined before advertising’s creative revolution of the 1960s, is the “unique selling proposition” (USP). The USP makes a great deal of sense for anything that doesn’t have a brand, in the traditional sense, attached to it. With a brand like BMW, a creative campaign that makes customers feel like classy, alpha businessmen for owning a BMW is an effective approach. A computer networking utility might not want or need that kind of brand development, in which case a USP is a strong alternative. The same is true for a movie. A trailer is selling the customer on what this particular movie will be like, since, to the extent that the movie is a brand itself, that brand starts and ends with the success of the movie. There are no good feelings to associate with the movie outside of how good the movie will be when it comes out. So if the trailer house is trying to design a marketing tool where the USP is the content of the film, why do we get these trailers that aren’t anything like the movie that gets released? And how can we learn from these mistakes and apply them to a larger context?
Let’s start by looking at a few examples of misleading trailers, and how they specifically distort things. In the trailer for Pixar’s Brave, we are lead to believe that Brave is going to be an action adventure movie about a badass Scottish girl and her bear companion. Instead, the movie is about a girl and her mother trying to find common ground concerning traditional marriage rituals, with all of the fantastical elements acting as convenient metaphors. In Bridge to Terabithia, we are lead to believe that the film is a Narnia-esque tale of two kids who find a portal to another world hidden deep in the forest near where they live. In reality, it’s a film about using your imagination to hide from the difficult aspects of life, such as being bullied or dealing with tragedy. But this kind of distortion isn’t limited to kid’s movies. The trailer for Stranger Than Fiction gives us the impression that it is a typical absurdist Will Ferrell comedy a la Anchorman or Semi-Pro. It’s actually a thoughtful dramedy exploring the role of an author as creator and by extension, how much an author gets to dictate a story and how much the characters they create begin to take on a life of their own. Happiness’s trailer makes it look like a lighthearted comedy as well, when in fact it is a deeply uncomfortable look at painful topics like unrequited love, failure, loneliness, and pedophilia.
The most apparent common factor here is that the movie presented in the trailer is something much simpler, safer, and with more broad appeal. In the case of Happiness and Stranger than Fiction, both films were made less challenging, socially and intellectually respectively. In the case of Brave and Bridge to Terabithia both films were stripped of their complexity and emotional weightiness in order to make them appear like more typical family-friendly kid’s films. This stems from the conflicting interests of the film’s creative and distribution teams. The above the line talent, the director, actors, and so on, are trying to make the best movie they possibly can. Motivated by desires other than money, making quality films gives them something to be proud of, fuels their creative drive, and satiates their ego. Motivated by greed, above the line talent wants to make the best movies they can because good movies boost their reputation, and reputation is what their agents leverage to get more and better paying gigs. On the other side of things, the studios are looking to score big opening weekends. To look at their motivations charitably, they do this because the first week’s ticket sales set the tone for the long-term success of a feature. Good initial ticket sales are strongly correlated to stable week to week ticket sales while in theaters, higher DVD sales, more lucrative TV licensing, and other sources of royalties and passive income. To look at their motivations more cynically, studios want to maximize their profits early on, before word of mouth can kill their product, and cashing out on big opening weekends is the pinnacle of that thinking. Either way, above the line talent often works toward making their projects nuanced and complex, while the studios look to obfuscate as much of that complexity as possible so that the “dumb general audience” isn’t scared away.
The obvious parallel to traditional marketing, here, is the conflicting goals that sometimes crop up between an agency and its client. For example, advertising agencies love risky ad campaigns that win them awards. And those awards are often a key feature of how they land new clients. So many of the agency websites I visit have virtual trophy walls where they display their great achievements, and that’s fine. An agency should be proud of the quality work it produces, especially when that work is recognized by an outside body. But very few clients want to risk it all on the big money and fabulous prizes. They want consistent, reliable performance that either improves their market position or shores them up against growing competition. Like with a movie, an advertisement that is too safe, and feels manufactured rather than crafted, often falls flat. But by the same measure, a beer brand that is built on traditional masculine values doesn’t want to experiment wildly with ads heavily steeped in homosexual themes. The ads might be exceptionally clever and progressive, get a lot of attention, and maybe even some acclaim, but the risk would be alienating a large set of their current consumer base, as well as potential customers in the more religiously conservative market of Middle America. Much like with movie marketing, a balancing act needs to be done. Faith in client’s desires by the agency and faith in the agency’s campaign by the client need to be given relatively equal weight. In the same way that studios expect filmmakers to make a movie that is, at least in some way, marketable, agencies need to respect the goals of their clients because that is what they were hired to serve. By the same token, for the same reasons studios should have faith in what the filmmakers finally produced, clients should give the benefit of the doubt to what an agency develops because that’s why they brought on the agency in the first place; to come up with the fresh, new, and/or atypical ideas needed to give their marketing campaign the kick in the butt it needs to get to the next level.
The hunt for broad appeal found in trailers isn’t limited to disguising the complexity. Have you ever seen a trailer for what seems like a familiar film starring a familiar face, but when you actually watched the movie it was nothing like you expected? This happens when the studio makes a trailer that reshapes something unusual into something familiar so that it will be easier to market. Take, for example, Man of the Year with Robin Williams. The premise of the movie, as displayed in the trailer, is that Robin Williams’ character, as a Jon Stewart analogy, runs for office and biting political satire follows as he and his team stumble through their campaign and eventual presidency. The movie was packaged as a comedic tour de force that skewers the American political system. The actual movie, however, is a comedic drama that mixes Robin Williams’ political wit with a darker second story about the dangers of rich companies and special interests manipulating elections through voter fraud. Needless to say, people were surprised when they watched the film and got something that was so different, tonally, from what was advertised. Another great example of this is the vast majority of M. Night Shyamalan films after Sixth Sense. Even though many of them are more thrillers than horror films, like Lady in the Water or Signs, they were all advertised as horror films. A similar issue plagued Spielberg’s early films as well, with the trailers showing E.T. as an alien-themed horror thriller or Gremlins as a cute and cuddly family film. In all of these examples, the studios knew what had worked in the past, and what the chief creative talent was most known for, and used that to try and sell the movie. It’s a comedy with Robin Williams so to get audiences interested it needs to look like this, or it’s a dark thriller from M. Night Shyamalan so to cash in on prior success it needs to look like that.
This kind of misrepresentation can be taken to a bizarre extreme. Sometimes, instead of simply displaying the wrong tone for a movie, they display the wrong movie for the movie. Take, for example, the films Kangaroo Jack and Snow Dogs. If you have seen the trailers for these films, you would think they were both low quality children’s films that feature talking animals. You would be completely wrong. Although both trailers feature talking animals, they are included in dream sequences. And yet, trailers for both films make it look like this is a central part of the movie. In the case of these two movies, it’s not even clear if kids would enjoy them very much. Kangaroo Jack is about a pair of friends trying to avoid getting killed by the mob and Snow Dogs is about an adopted son seeking the truth about his biological parents, who just happen to have been dog trainers in Alaska. On their face, neither of these scream cheap children’s entertainment.
The key parallel here is when marketing strategy is being developed for an unfamiliar product from a familiar source. Sometimes an agency doesn’t know how to develop a marketing strategy to market something, so they shape it into something they recognize and try to sell that. Consider how Apple’s iPad was initially marketed. When it was announced, Apple described it as a brand new device that would revolutionize how we think about computers. They even insinuated that the iPad could be a computer killer. But that wasn’t where the strength of the initial iPad lay. The first generation of iPads were entertainment devices. They were horrible as input devices, meaning that they could never hope to topple desktops or laptops, but they excelled as output devices. As a result, most early adopters championed their utility in surfing the web, reading ebooks, playing high definition mobile games, watching movies on Netflix, and so on. It was this endorsement, as well as Apple’s sterling reputation, that drove sales beyond the first day buyers, not the concept of the iPad as the next big revolution in the traditional computer market. It wasn’t until third party companies marketed add-ons, like a physical keyboard, that the iPad became a serious contender as a killer of the traditional computer, and even now it remains a controversial claim. The same mistakes get made by ad agencies, marketing execs, and communications experts who work with tons of brands across the spectrum of business types. It is easy to be seduced by a company’s past success or bold claims of a product’s importance, and lose track of where a product’s strengths really are and how those strengths should be marketed. Ultimately, as with the movie and its trailer, the correct decision is to make sure that the customer doesn’t feel tricked. Seeing a trailer for one movie, and getting another, will make people hate the movie even if it was good for what it was. By the same token, marketing should play to the strengths of the product and not try to oversell its capabilities.