In the winter of 2013/14, we circulated a set of questions relating to trailer viewing practices, contexts and attitudes. The survey was inspired by our love for trailers, academic and professional interest in them and what we felt was a gap in the research about their audiences. Given how important, expensive and difficult trailers are to make, this struck us an oversight of practical and theoretical dimensions.
Review a small selection of the data on why trailers matter and you get an idea of how valuable a better understanding of the experience and behaviour of their audiences could be. Consider that previous studies have suggested that:
There is, of course, a well-established and profitable sector that considers audience responses to movie previews. For over 3 decades, reports have been produced for thousands of feature film campaigns on the basis of mall-intercept interviews. But the primary focus of that research has been the measurement of audience response to the trailers for a given film in order to guide marketing executives and trailer-making creatives in producing better (or better-testing) materials for that particular film.
Though this is mission-critical information for film distributors and the marketing executives whose careers depend on box office results, we think there are deeper and broader issues involved. In addition to standard demographic inquiries, we wanted to know about the viewing/consuming context (what place, what media, what else is occurring and what comes after), and what respondents think about their experience of both a specific trailer and of trailers in general.
What are audience expectations? What do they know --or think they know-- about trailers as films, as commercials, as entertainment and as marketing & communicational tools?
Trailer making is an art (sometimes merely a craft) rather than a science, but knowing the audience’s uses, attitudes and expectations is bound to inform and improve the communicational exchange. We asked questions with a yes/no response AND multiple choice answers; we also invited open-ended comments and replies. Within the quantitative and qualitative responses, we discern and distinguish an account of the attitudes, practices and predilections of trailer audiences.
We’re excited to share our findings and our methods with the public and dedicated to enlarging our data set. With more respondents and better questions we hope to add detail to our map of the theoretical, educational and commercial implications of this fascinating area of film studies.
You can read more about the project in an academic commentary piece in the Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, a copy of which is hosted by the UEA digital repository here.
To kick off our first survey, we asked some very simple, but (we felt) very necessary questions that allowed us to understand exactly what kinds of interactive processes exist between the trailer, and the audience. In doing so these questions opened up into a whole host of different interconnecting, often overlapping issues that form a tangled web of viewing culture.
We look forward to sharing our results with you: we will be blogging on this site, and taking our results to various academic venues as they become available and the opportunities arise. Please explore the site according to your interests and curiosity. And do let us know what you think.
Fred Greene, Ph.D., Keith Johnston, Ph.D., Ed Vollans, Ph.D.
Review a small selection of the data on why trailers matter and you get an idea of how valuable a better understanding of the experience and behaviour of their audiences could be. Consider that previous studies have suggested that:
- "Movie audiences reported higher expectations... after seeing a preview" (Eastman, S.T., Bradbury, D.E. & Nemes, R.S. (1985)
- "We note that film trailers are the most widely consumed promotional materials, followed by news coverage, production videos, and the official website." (Davis, C.H., Michelle, C., Hight, C. & Hardy, A. (2013)
- "Cinema advertising has a higher rate of recall than other media – recall tests have measured up to 86 percent recall four weeks after exposure." (Johnson, K. F. (1981)
- "Previews (trailers) shown in theatres were more important than were ads presented in radio, newspapers, or magazines" (Austin, B.A. (1981)
There is, of course, a well-established and profitable sector that considers audience responses to movie previews. For over 3 decades, reports have been produced for thousands of feature film campaigns on the basis of mall-intercept interviews. But the primary focus of that research has been the measurement of audience response to the trailers for a given film in order to guide marketing executives and trailer-making creatives in producing better (or better-testing) materials for that particular film.
Though this is mission-critical information for film distributors and the marketing executives whose careers depend on box office results, we think there are deeper and broader issues involved. In addition to standard demographic inquiries, we wanted to know about the viewing/consuming context (what place, what media, what else is occurring and what comes after), and what respondents think about their experience of both a specific trailer and of trailers in general.
What are audience expectations? What do they know --or think they know-- about trailers as films, as commercials, as entertainment and as marketing & communicational tools?
Trailer making is an art (sometimes merely a craft) rather than a science, but knowing the audience’s uses, attitudes and expectations is bound to inform and improve the communicational exchange. We asked questions with a yes/no response AND multiple choice answers; we also invited open-ended comments and replies. Within the quantitative and qualitative responses, we discern and distinguish an account of the attitudes, practices and predilections of trailer audiences.
We’re excited to share our findings and our methods with the public and dedicated to enlarging our data set. With more respondents and better questions we hope to add detail to our map of the theoretical, educational and commercial implications of this fascinating area of film studies.
You can read more about the project in an academic commentary piece in the Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, a copy of which is hosted by the UEA digital repository here.
To kick off our first survey, we asked some very simple, but (we felt) very necessary questions that allowed us to understand exactly what kinds of interactive processes exist between the trailer, and the audience. In doing so these questions opened up into a whole host of different interconnecting, often overlapping issues that form a tangled web of viewing culture.
We look forward to sharing our results with you: we will be blogging on this site, and taking our results to various academic venues as they become available and the opportunities arise. Please explore the site according to your interests and curiosity. And do let us know what you think.
Fred Greene, Ph.D., Keith Johnston, Ph.D., Ed Vollans, Ph.D.