How effective is the combination of your product and ancillary texts?

Film distribution is the way in which a film is promoted and advertised in order to attract it's intended target audience. Some famous examples of film distributors would be 20th Century Fox Film Co. Ltd and Columbia Pictures. These companies make use of a wide range of techniques and platforms to get their product noticed, some include TV/Cinema ads, outside posters and web/online ads. The way a film uses something like a Cinema ad is different to that of a web or outside ad. A cinema ad is always before a screening of a film and will be the trailer for the film. A outside.web ad is different, they will rely on things like posters and banners to grab attention. For example, in my local area, their are adverts for films on the sides of bus stops and even the buses themselves. Here is a photo of a typical bus stop poster, this one is advertising the film District 9 back in 2009. There's even a different when it comes to web ads. Web ads could be trailers that are shown before YouTube videos similar to that of a cinema screening, or they could also be in the form of a banner or side bar on a webpage giving a effect similar to that of a outside advert.


The audience in which a film is made for can hugely affect the way the film is marketed. The demographic of the potential audience plays a large part in this. A great example of this is the marketing campaign for the early Paranormal Activity films. We know that their main audience is of the teen-young adult age. This gave the distributors a great way to pull their audience through the use of the internet. People within targeted age rage make up a very large percent of people on the internet so it only seemed right for them to do it. It also ruled out things such as location as the web is the same wherever, whereas you'd have to take something like this into account when using outside adverts.  This is the Paranormal Activity 1 trailer that currently has 28 Million views on YouTube. This is known as being a 'viral' campaign. It relies on people seenig it and showing their friends and it continues to grow and grow.



Another more recent viral ad campaign was the new Carrie re-make which got a staggering 55 million views in half a year. It was a rigged coffee shop where a girl pretended to have telekinetic powers like Carrie. The set was rigged and the reactions of the public were filmed and made into this video.