Indie Film Hits Big from Clever Marketing
Considered to be today’s highest grossing film ever made (in ratio with its minimal production budget), Paranormal Activity has broken the mold for movie marketing. With an extremely low budget of $15,000, Paranormal Activity has made a domestic gross total of $97,628,727 since its release in late September according to the Box Office Mojo. It is said that a movie must make twice the amount of its production cost in order to just break even. That will tell you how profitable this movie has been.
The horror flick, similar to the late 90′s Blair Witch Project, is about a couple who documents ghosts in their apartments with an everyday video camera. The target audience was known off the bat to be directed towards young people, so producers had to come up with a way to cheaply sell the low-budget film. According to Tad Friend, a writer from the New Yorker, “the science of marketing is determining which old movie your new movie is like” so that you can simply mimic those marketing techniques used previously if they were successful. So Paranormal Activity producers imitated The Blair Witch Project, in an updated fashion. In the late 90′s, The Blair Witch Project was talked about by young people and marketed by word of mouth. Today, we don’t even need to rely on word of mouth, for we have “word of type”, with websites like Facebook and Twitter.
Consequently, Paranormal Activity was prescreened by select colleges, producing shocking (literally) results. Young people were scared witless and self-marketed the film via the internet. The film’s website urged for viewers to demand that the film come to theaters in their town and that is exactly what they did. The rest is marketing history.
I think that this shows the strength of “word of type” and the importance of social networking sites, which obviously have cast a spell over society. It was a brilliant endeavor to participate in “do-it-yourself marketing”, because it clearly worked. I think now more films will copy this advertising format and set new standards for marketing movies.
