Promotion Strategies: Lessons from Traditional Media

Big or small, if you want your film or video series to be successful you need as many people to see it as possible. The major studios and television networks know this better than anyone, and along with star filled casts, special effects and distributions strategies, proper promotion provides a foundation for blockbuster success.

Take Titanic, for example. Its budget has been estimated at a cool $200 million, approximately $25 million of which went to promotion. ( This Magazine)

Unsuccessful marketing and promotion can kill even the best movies, while movies roundly rejected by audiences can still become box office hits based on strong opening weekend numbers. Sure word-of-mouth audience activities can impact the films overall run, but if the audience doesn't know about a movie in the first place, there is little change that chit-chat can drive people to the theatre.

The same is true for Internet productions. Everyone hope that their video will "go viral" and be seen by millions of viewers. Once again, it needs to start somewhere and without a promotion budget your film or Internet series is likely to be lost in the sea of vlogs and webcam strip teases.

This is not a new problem, take MOWs (movies of the week) for example. These movies rarely have stars or special effects and marketing budgets are small if they exist at all. It is common to see these and other low budget movies band together, providing a broadcasts with a package of shows that can fill various time blocks in their schedule. This strategy provides exposure and revenue to movies that would otherwise never be seen.

With the nature of traditional broadcast and distribution industries changing to adapt to the internet, traditional marketing, promotion and distribution strategies need to adapt but not forget the lessons of the past 50 years. Your internet series will still need a promotions budget, sound and consistent distribution and properly networked packaging. The T-Cast Network Channels ( ComedyCaster, DramaCaster and Sci-FiCaster) can assist with all three of these activities.

By T-Casting, your shows are networked with other productions in the same form and genre instead of connecting similar viewers like YouTube, myspace, and other social network video sites. It provides simple click distribution, no login or search required, and because the content is streamed the producer maintains control of the over all presentation and revenue generation. And lastly the T-Cast Network generates its own promotion budget, that it uses to bring viewers to your content. Quite simply with the T-Cast Network, your videos have a far greater chance of getting the exposure needed to make the show a success.