The Marketing of Paranormal Activity — on AdAge
Paranormal Activity, a horror flick was produced for $15,000 a couple years ago. It opened on limited screens the weekend of October 2nd 2009 for a gross of $500,000, with a wider release the weekend of October 9th for a gross above $ 7 million.
As a marketing-advertising geek/student/professional, I believe better business and better marketing = more creativity and better films. Shoot me 
AdvertisingAge, a leading trade magazine has an interesting article on how the film was marketed—based on audience demand. I thought it might be of interest to y’ll.
Head over to the AdAge article quickly (will only be available to paid subscribers a week from now)
http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=139588
Here are some excerpts:
“A month ago, few people outside of Paramount and select cities knew about “Paranormal Activity.” But this week, the ultra-low-budget horror movie is on track to becoming one of the year’s most-profitable films. How? By letting consumers play distribution chief, and taking more than a few cues from the “Blair Witch Project” playbook.”
Tags: film distribution, horror, Indie, marketing, paramount, paranormal activity, paranormal activity marketing, Trailer“Fans across the country could demand — literally, it turns out, by hitting a “Demand” button on its website — that the movie screen in their area. That, in turn, determined which markets Paramount would select for a series of midnight screenings — all achieved by using a bare minimum of select TV spots featuring reaction shots from Hollywood screenings and a smattering of online and radio ads.”
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Just seen the movie over weekend in Minneapolis.
And I can say that it is the scariest film that I have seen in all my life. It just builds on you and the fear gets to you as you go to the last 40 minutes of the film.
Majority of the audience in the theater were literally jumping in their seats for few of the scenes.
This movie is not kind of in your face horror with full of gore and blood, but a documentary style movie filmed with a home video cam.
Hoping that folks in India get to see this movie soon and I can guarantee that you will not be dissapointed.
Well I’m all for such films both because of the genre and also because of the indie nature of the film.Regarding the marketing activity which is consumer linked – its been possible since a biggie like Paramount has got associated with it.Not too sure if such a thing will work out in India though.Lets see if UTV and the others are watching this phenomenon closely.
saw the official trailer on youtube,for me it was satisfactory
,but i would still prefer the “japanese connection” movies
Very interesting marketing here. You make a demand pool and then take that to distributors to distribute the film basis the exact demand told in numbers. Shit this is so doable on FB and Twitter. Yo can even run $30-$40 campaigns and get people to demand a release. Like the event invite app on FB. Awesome! I remember watching Blairwitch, it spooked me and when I read it that it was all staged, it killed the whole feeling.
Neeraj- it isnt so easy in India.Do you think a production house could go with data and ask distributors to act upon the same just like that?It would be easier for people like a UTV or a YRF to do it because they have all 3 arms- marketing team,production team as well as distribution set up.And I repeat there has to be a backing of a big name to work this out.If indie producers would wanna try this route,it would be extremely difficult unless he/she wants to take the risk of distributing also.
Sethu, I dont think it’s difficult. Here’s an example. Lets say an Indie film is ready. They cut an awesome trailer, like the way you have the Paranormal trailer. Make a FB page. Market it heavily using campaigns on FB ( they cost less than $100) With that kind of investment you could get about 3-4k fans in a month’s time, trust me ( of course the concept has to be promoted effectively and that the film has to be that good too) Once you have them on board you put an event application. Asking how many people would want watch the film. The responses are captured by FB and fed back to the page. You can easily show this to a distributor.
Forgot to mention that the film maker can now pitch through percentages. If out of 3k fans on his/her page, if 2500 say yes to the event then its a 83% probability that motivated users will come for the show. Its only indicative but it is a correct indication.
Neeraj what you’ve mentioned is surely easy.I have no doubts about it.today even in India the power of social marketing tools like FB,Orkut,Twitter etc is quite good.What I meant was using the data generated to ask the distributor to make the necessary distribution/exhibition patterns.Thats where the catch is.Of course an attempt can be made to gauge the possibilities.
err doubt: What if that audience is scattered throughout the country with your per city data not being substantial? Or are you saying that with the 83% of acceptance, you are just indicating its potential widespread impact or something? (using projection techniques and stuff to get the bigger figure and all).
Coz I feel such FB surveys are essentially misleading on two counts:
1 – The standard lying in the survey thingy
2 – The fan page itself would/could probably be a minority of all the people who otherwise watch movies in theatre.
Yeah. I have the same doubt. In a vast country like ours, we can’t have the desired spread for a distributor to feature the film. Though it does look like a “way of the future”, it’d take a longer time, I guess.
Very informative. Thanks.
http://movies.rediff.com/report/2009/oct/14/next-big-horror-film-after-blair-witch.htm
This one says the movie could gross $20 million. Wow. All these strategies could help indie films which get made, but find it difficult to advertise and market.