Charley Osborn A2 Media Blog

A film distributor is responsible for the marketing of a film and they obtains the rights to a film to make it available to the public. Their job includes elements such as marketing, advertising and releasing the film itself. The challenge for distributors is to bring every individual film to the market by identifying its key audience, considering why this audience might go to see the film and developing partnerships in order to build awareness and interest for the film upon release. Many distributors will use different strategies in marketing and advertising, this can include outdoor advertising such as billboards, bus posters and bus stop posters. Advertisement can also include TV, radio, websites and social media pages like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They can also target the mainstream media with promo tours that include, meet & greets, interviews and photoshoots. After the cinematic release, distributors also need to promote the release of the film through home entertainment (DVD and TV) so things such as promotional videos and offers through companies such as Sky or Tesco where they release an exclusive extended cut helps make a profit on the film in the long run.

Teaser Poster

Main Poster

Trolls is a 2016 animated musical adventure romance comedy film. Trolls was distributed by DreamWorks and is from the creators of Shrek. This alone tells us that the target audience for this film is younger children. The distributors reached this audience through promotion and advertising. They first released a teaser poster which showed bright pink hair against a blue background, colours that contrasted with each other, and the slogan ‘who says you can’t wear your hair up?’ This slogan with the image gives connotations of a typical troll, as they typically have their hair styled straight up. There is a clear uniformed identity between their teaser and main poster, as they both involve bright colours and the trolls hair can be visibly seen, this is iconography as the hair is what you think of when you think of a troll. The trailer begins with a male troll, Branch, who appears to be one of the main characters, but within 20 seconds the second troll, Poppy is introduced. She is the one who can be seen on the teaser trailer, which once again created a uniformed identity. Another thing is the consistent bright, fun colours that appear across all three, helping to link them all together. Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick are the voices of our two main characters, and they were used for the majority of promotion appearing across a number of different TV and Radio shows worldwide as well as featuring in a number of YouTube videos, where they collaborated with popular social media stars and took part in fun activities that could link to the film and could be fun for young children to try and recreate, therefore helping them appeal more to their audience. Using big names like Justin Timberlake and Anna Kendrick as the main voices as well as for all of the promotion meant that the distributors were perhaps able to reach a secondary audience. This audience could be those who are fans of Justin and Anna and want to see any films they feature in, which can increase the films sales as well as their profit. Trolls has grossed approx. $153,000,000 since its release in November (as of March 2017).

I tried to follow conventions and create a uniformed identity with all of my products so that it was easy to see that they are all promoting the same thing. However, I did challenge some conventions to create a sense of originality and individuality.

Please ensure that annotations are turned on for this video, as they occur throughout the whole thing, including the trailer. Pause whenever necessary so that you can read the annotations.