Marketing and Movies - The Analogy

Late last week, I was trying to explain about marketing campaigns to a budding marketer. Wanted to do that through an analogy to make it easier for him to understand and remember. Then a 'eureka' moment struck me. I said, hang on bro, I've got an interesting analogy.

It was Movies and Marketing! I could think of many parallels between campaigns and movies, thought it was interesting, so went on to explain.

The parallels fit perfectly between how a movie is produced and how a campaign is executed right from conception to completion.

Some aspects of this analogy may also apply to how software development or other projects, and I’d leave that thinking to the technologists that have come here to read this article.

Movie Theme:

The first aspect to decide about a campaign is the topic, same goes for a movie.

Once you have the topic, you need to think of the best way to put that topic in front of the audience. Depending upon the target audience, your message context would be technical or business, similar to a movie made for masses versus a selected set of audience.

That’s your high-level campaign messaging, similar to a movie theme. ?

The Producer and Director:

As a marketer, you are the director of the campaign whereas your company is the producer. For you to excel in directing a campaign, you need to understand the underlying offerings that you're promoting through these campaign.

You need to be 'convinced' about them, just as a movie director is.

The Casting:

You also have a say in the casting of the campaign, i.e. the keywords. So you'd also need to put a lot of thought behind the keywords - the main actors in your campaign. They will have a major impact on how your campaign performs.

The Creatives:

The creative team is your director of photography for your campaign. They need to understand the campaign message and ensure that all the creatives reflect the message in some way.

The Content:

The content writers are your dialogue and story writers. They need to know the trending keywords for the campaign topic and be able to weave those in the campaign messaging, so it resonates with your target audience.

The Actors:

The next are the movie actors. I believe the words in your campaign headline message are your main actors. Because those are the words that will promote you in front of your audience, attract audience to your campaign. ?

Unless you have a leading actor as part of your movie, your audience may not be attracted to it. As soon as you have an established actor, chances of the movie getting wider audience increase. Similarly, you need to have highly relevant keywords/key message in your campaign to generate wider interest.

The Promotion:

Just as movies are promoted using the actor’s name, your campaign will be promoted using the keywords, hence those become extremely important.

A related aspect, that comes in at a later stage is how a movie is promoted – is it promoted using actor’s popularity or the using the movie theme. In marketing parlance, it could mean promotion using specific keywords or talking about the overarching technology or service. Both have their pros and cons, and should be decided based on target audience selection and campaign medium/platform.

Next is how the promotion happens. For movies, the promotion would be through posters, trailer and other promotional activities. I consider the trailer to be similar to the email subject line or paid media campaign headline. The movie trailer has a direct relation with audience attraction. So, your trailer must be made with the sole objective of attracting audience, i.e. attracting recipients to open your email or click on your media advertisement. The outcome here will be the number of viewers booking tickets to the movie, or in marketing terms, email opens and click-throughs.

Secondary Publicity:

If your campaigns are well-connected to what your target audience does, and are eye-catching, they can also get you peer-to-peer publicity where a decisionmaker from one company/department forwards your email to a peer for their consideration.

The Outcomes:

The campaign outcomes are similar to the revenues generated by a movie. Just as a movie may perform well in certain geography, your campaign may also perform well for a certain subset of target audience. The performance analysis will help in fine-tuning future campaigns.

Thousands of movies are made each year, but only a handful of them are acclaimed and generate revenue numbers equal to or beyond expectations. Similarly, not all your campaigns will be successful. There might be some campaigns that do not yield any results.

But if you analyze what went wrong with the low performing campaigns, and tweak your strategy for the next one, you’d be on the right path.

Happy marketing!!