Hey indie filmmakers, now you get to do it all!
Not only do you need to devise and make your movie, now you have to BYOA: bring your own audience.
I have two sources to quote today: IndieWire and Future of Film.
Daren Smith writes on IndieWire that Indie Film Has an Audience Problem.
He starts with: “The model most of us use is some version of this: put out a handful of Instagram posts, cut a trailer, build a website, and then, a month before release, spray-and-pray ads at every target demographic we can afford…. Add up the time that model asks of a potential audience member. Ten minutes of scrolling + three minutes of trailer + two minutes on the website + maybe an ad or two they don’t skip. Fifteen to 20 minutes across maybe two mediums.”
He then invokes Daniel Priestley’s 7-11-4 formula:
“Before the average buyer says yes, they consume seven hours of content, across 11 touches, on four different mediums.”
That’s a lot of content, potentially 4-5 times more time than your whole movie!
How to accomplish this? I’m going to acrostically label his strategy as EAT-V.
Which stands for Events, Audio, Text and Video.
EVENTS: any in-person gathering related to your project. “It might be table reads, meetups, industry nights, test screenings, salons, a rehearsal open to investors. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is that you plan it, you’re strategic about who’s invited, and you do it more than once.”
AUDIO: podcasts! “And if you can get on a video podcast, you’ve got a “two-fer”. The video goes on YouTube and they post short clips on social. The audio gets distributed on Apple and Spotify and dozens of other platforms. Heck, if the host is awesome they’ll also send out an email blast to their list.”
TEXT: “Newsletters. Emails. Blogs. LinkedIn. This column, right here…. Start with a simple email list, get people on it any way you can, and keep delivering value over time.”
VIDEO: Post short-form video on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Your long-form video is your podcast appearances, behind-the-scenes videos, and interviews.
Eleven touches means you need hundreds of potential opportunities for your prospective audience to stumble across your project. (And don’t forget to remind people to show up to your live events!)
He truly believes:
“Only half of my job now is bringing a movie to theaters. The other half is bringing the audience with it.”
On the Future of Film podcast, Alex Stolz interviews Lego community strategist Carol Trang.
One key takeaway:
“Show up where your audience already is.”
My take: for all its faults, one thing that legacy media did well was to make sure the audience reached a critical mass. By this I mean that the commercial decisions behind publishing a book, producing a movie or pressing an album were based in large part on whether the audience was large enough to recoup both production and marketing costs, while creating enough profit to be sustainable. In our digital, much flatter, less gate-kept world where cheaper costs mean much more competition for attention, building audiences is harder than ever. And it turns out, the task is much more involved than we imagined.