Marketing Work

After watching our film the first thing we all agreed upon was to market the film towards people who are bipolar. We decided to do this because the film is about a man dealing with a breakup that was caused by his girlfriend being bipolar. Jon went online and searched for bipolar groups in the Orlando area and contacted a few of them.

Since the female lead was a painter, we decided to market toward artists. We didn't go any further with this idea.

After Jon spoke with the filmmaker, he told the group the they filmmaker didn't want us to market toward people who are bipolar. The filmmaker wanted us to market toward art/film students and he was willing to do TV/radio interviews.

Jon contacted local newspapers and radio stations to try to get them to market our film. He wrote a press release on our film. The radio stations we contacted told him that they scheduled their programs months in advance. The local newspapers he contacted said that they already did their coverage of the Florida Film Festival. One of them contacted him later saying that he wanted to do an interview with the filmmaker. Jon gave the reporter the filmmaker's info.

We assigned someone to create a MySpace AD. We decided to create one because we were learning a lot about online guerrilla marketing. We chose MySpace because we all liked the keyword search more than Facebook. Marc was assigned to create i. The keywords Marc used in the ad were: Indie films, drama, romance, and a few more that he can't remember. The amount we put down for the ad was $60 and chose the minimum price for each click.

Rebecca made fliers to hand out and we were going to hand them out at Valencia and Full Sail. We contacted them to see about their policy on handing out fliers. They both said they don't allow people to hand out fliers on campus. Rebecca then found a part of Full Sail that wasn't part of the main campus and she and Jon handed out fliers there. We chose to hand out fliers at Full Sail because the filmmaker told us that he was the first person to use this special type of lens and we thought it would appeal to Full Sail students.

After our first screening Rebecca came up with the idea to go on campus with poster board to inform people about our film. The idea was to have people draw on the poster board while we tell them about the movie. We started out in the area in front of the library and then made our way to the front of the student union.

Jon:
Contacted the Filmmaker
Contacted bipolar groups
Contacted local newspapers and radio stations
Set up group meetings
Set up blog

Rebecca:
Made fliers
Help set up blog
Thought of the poster board idea

Marc:
Set up MySpace AD

Our biggest disappointment was that the filmmaker didn't want us to market toward people who were bipolar. That would have gotten a lot more people to show up. We should have not listened and done it anyway. The film was hard enough to market and he took away the only thing we had going for us. One thing we learned to not do is to contact the place where you are planning to hand out fliers at. If you ask the place if you can, then they are most likely going to say no. If you don't contact them about it, then they won't know you are doing it and the worst thing they can do is tell you to leave. One thing we could have done better was going anywhere and handing out fliers. We only handed out fliers at part of Full Sail the was not part of the main campus and at the Florida Film Festival. Another problem we had was that we always did stuff as a group. Instead of always meeting up and doing things together, we could have done things individually which would have saved time. One major success we had was one of the local newspapers contacted us saying that he wanted to interview the filmmaker. The power board idea was one of our better ideas, but Rebecca thought of it too late. If we could do it all over we would have been on the street more and would have followed through with the bipolar groups.