At the end of March every year, the Society for Cinema & Media Studies hosts it’s annual conference, it’s a chance for colleagues to get together and catch up, present papers and network. 2016’s SCMS in Atlanta, Georgia was no exception but it threw into contrast the sheer volume of work surrounding promotion and promotional shorts. While it’s impossible to collate everything from the conference (the programme can be found here) I’d like to explore just a few of the presentations here in the hope to build dialogue around the trailer, with apologies to those papers I couldn't attend and to the few that I'm going to consider here I cannot hope to do your papers justice so please free to add your comments below. In the future I want to explore other papers' themes so watch this space. 
 
Anticipation and the trailer

Trailers are arguably all about anticipation, the very nature of advertising something in advance of it's availability is to develop anticipation (some may say 'desire', but I find this term too loaded to use here). No where is anticipation or suspense more overt than in the horror movie, and indeed in horror movie promotion where the audience experience is key. 

Alexander Svensson’s work into promotion and horror opened up possibilities in considering the promotional horror paratext as an element of affect and performance similar to the film itself. In this respect Svensson echoes the work of Picarelli and of the work of the Trailaurality project on the scream in the horror trailer, exploring how viral and catharsis is used to generate and sustain interest across a campaign. Svensson used an example (amongst many others) of the Devils Due movie marketing campaign and how it plays on the notions of expectations, our delight comes in the form of other’s reactions.

You can check out the equally interesting website for the movie Devil's Due here.

 
Having perhaps been scared ourselves, we are far more likely to have memory recall, or perhaps to build on this experience by sharing that experience with others, becoming pranksters ourselves or perhaps we will sit in isolation at our computers seeking similar videos to watch other’s experiences.

This kind of experience has long been the case in horror, issues of catharsis, affect and audience reaction remain at the heart of the genre, Last House on the Left for example, famously had the tagline ‘to avoid fainting, keep repeating it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie’, while much earlier William Castle and Hitchcock employed a variety of stunts to promote their work (the subject of which has been extensively covered but may be worth another blog post as I build ideas up).
 
Yet in capitalising on viral culture, these campaigns have the propensity to take on a life of their own, circulating as part of a series of reaction videos (many of which can still be found on YouTube with recent comments), the campaign video has itself become a cultural artefact for it’s ability to fascinate and/or scare the audience. Indeed this type of promotional video plays very much on anticipation; both anticipation within the short film, but also for the ‘central’ text being promoted.
 
This form of anticipation is very much part of the cinema industry, an industry that uses anticipatory terminology ‘teasers’, ‘preview’, ‘sneak peak’, ‘exclusive’, all of which are designed to draw the audience into a relationship of exclusivity (you, the fans are special, whereas those other non-audience members aren’t). It is on this note that Erin Hanna gave an analysis of San Diego  ComicCon highlighting the competing discourse between drawing fans in to an exclusive event, while keeping elements of it under control (specifically pirate videos of exclusive content). Arguing that ComicCon has value to it’s audience because of it’s exclusivity (Yes, a lot of people can attend, can buy merchandise but a greater number of people cannot attend) Hanna notes, attendees of a specific event (the launch of Star Wars Force Awakens) were invited to another open air performance complete with orchestra and fireworks. Despite being an open space, and thus unavoidably heard and seen from a distance, it is the intangible experience of attendees allowed in the area that is the source exclusivity, yet simultaneously publicising an event yelling ‘here is something special, but you’re not special enough for it’.  Taking the Hall H launch of Star Wars; Force Awakens as an example of this exclusivity, Hanna works through the power organisation, and the lines of exclusivity discourse that run throughout ComiCon, forming sights of pleasure anticipation and exclusivity among fans. Both these papers tie in with a much larger discussion colleagues on the Watching the Trailer project are having, you can read Keith M Johnston’s (far more eloquent) work on anticipatory culture here. If anything viral videos and events like ComiCon serve to outline the very notion that the event is always coming soon, as part of a much larger network of texts; posters may feed to trailers, trailers in turn may feed to films (or not in some cases, leaving some audiences forever in an anticipatory twilight zone), films feed into franchises, spin offs, other work by our favourite stars. Are we living now in an anticipatory culture, or is this simply an extension of the media industry which after all is technologically and financially predicate on the next frame? And what about those audience members that anticipate very little, can we theorise a culture of anticipation and still retain audience agency? 

The answers I'm sure, are coming soon.
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and now the shameless publicity...

Ed Vollans is a researcher for the watching the trailer project, he tweets at @ed_vollans, his work 'So just What is a trailer anyway?' was highly commended in the Emerald Publishing Literati awards, which means you can read it FREE temporarily here.
 

This fortnight we're joined by Andrés Auchterlonie, welcome Andrés! 

Andrés is an Argentinian media researcher, interested in movie trailers, social media, advertising and entertainment marketing. Has a BA in Film and TV Production and a one year certificate in Digital Marketing, and specialises in movie marketing.

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Over the years, movie trailers have had to adapt to the demands of cinema, society and the market, evolving with them in order to not remain static over time. Nowadays, trailers can be considered as a social representation of a society characterised by immediacy, finding themselves in a spectacularised space where artistic creation and digital culture must come together to recognise the needs of a customer who is accustomed to instant information. It is important to know that this new audience thinks through emotions and not with logical arguments.

   In a society where everything is consumed at high speed, there is little chance of attracting the consumers attention, that is why the Creative Marketing department must adapt their strategies to these new ways of consumption, where internet, social networks and consumers as content generators play an important role for the film´s success. With the evolution of technological devices and the emergence of social networks, the way that audience watch movie trailers has been transformed into an experience of personal consumption, but thank to social networks this way of watching them become a collective experience through exchange of opinions, discussions and analyze of coming attractions. Thanks to technological devices such as smartphones and tablets movie trailers became a take away format where their consumption can be extended to any public sphere thanks to the possibility of transporting them in these new devices. It is important to offer a product that fits into consumers lifestyles.
Advertising trailers on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat brings not interactivity but also a bi-directional exchange with consumers that are seeking for a creative, interactive and engaging experience. In this new era audiences became into an element with great power because they generate and produce content. Marc Cortés called them prosumers (Producer + Consumer) explaining "... Markets are changing and they are now conversations where customers are no longer expressionless or inert beings, but they are transformed into social elements because they generate new contents ", in those virtual spaces prosumers exchange opinions about movie trailers. If their opinions are positive the trailer can be a hit and going viral or they can destroy it as it happened with Green Lantern´s (2010) movie trailer. They determine whether the product is attractive or not. Nowadays thanks to social media, marketers can verify really quickly if a trailer it is accepted or not by the public, as it happened with Star Wars: The force awakens (2015) movie trailer that on it first day on the network quickly obtained more than 112 million views, which generated a great conversation on the social media. Doug Hirsch Yahoo! Movies G.M in an interview with Variety explains "...The studies were worried about seeing their trailers on the Internet, now they are terribly worried if they cannot be found by users on the networks." Thanks to a "Like" "Tweet" or "Retweet" the trailer becomes a hypermediate content that the consumer can share, criticise or appreciate.

     What every marketer want is that the audience talk about their film in order to go viral. Using social networks is a way to segment our audience and corroborate if the product it is accepted or not by them. In addition it is really important to generate a good strategy to succeed in this really hard competition. The movie trailers purpose as an entertainment marketing strategy is to create an effect of anticipation in the audience, they are in charge of sharing it or pressing the "like" button generating anticipation and producing word of mouth. Nowadays for consumers is more important what their peers evoke of a product that what the product says about itself, if they make positive comments about a movie trailer they can generate on the others users the desire to watch it. Currently it is worrying if a trailer does not receive the amount of likes or views needed to become viral, for this reason communication strategies must be really creative since there is only one chance to convince the public and generate the need to watch the film.

     Finally, marketers must bear in mind that is not necessary to have a big budget to make a good marketing campaign through social networks because what matters and what will give us success is the creativity of the strategy.

Selected works:

Cortes, Marc (2009) “Bienvenido al nuevo marketing”. En E. Sanagustín (Dir.): Del 1.0 al 2.0: Claves para entender el nuevo marketing. Bubok Publishing, pp. 14.

Janes, Stephanie (2014). Viral strategies in Hollywood Cinema.

Johnston, Keith M. (2009) Coming Soon. Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. McFarland.

Lieberman Al, Esgarte Patricia (2006). The Entertainment Marketing Revolution:
Bringing the Moguls, the Media, and the Magic to the World.

Lozano, Javier. (2012) Nuevas estrategias publicitarias digitales.


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