Clever film promotion

The way you promote a film is a very big part of how well the film does at the box office.  If nobody knows your film is out or what it is about, nobody will go and see it.

Films such as The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity all had the same type of advertising campaign. The producers claimed the footage was all real and the film was not a film more a home movie gone wrong.

The Blair Witch Project went one step further though. Just before the film was released, the three main characters were listed as "Missing, presumed dead"  on popular film website imdb.com.

Missing Posters were placed around the famous Sundance festival for each of the three main characters but were quickly taken down due to a unrelated incident. Flyers were also handed out around American Universities and college's. The flyers stated that there were three people missing. You guessed it the three people where of course the three main characters.

In my opinion this was a very clever advertising strategy. The Blair Witch was the first of many films to use this "Home made" video look which seems to go hand in hand with horror films.

 Cloverfield went a step further then The Blair Witch project by posting a teaser trailer, which was played before Transformers in 2007, showing nothing but an explosion in New York City and the Statue of Liberty's head being thrown down a street. The trailer was shot entirely on a hand - held video camera. There was no title on the trailer just a date. Which obviously later turned out to be the film's release date.

The poster started to appear in cinema's and on billboards the world over soon after. It simply showed the Statue of Liberty with no head and smoke coming from New York City. A tagline of "Something has found us" was later added to certain posters.

The best piece of advertising the Cloverfield producer's thought up was having all the characters have a MySpace page. All the main characters last logged into their MySpace pages on January 28th 2008 which was the release date if the film.

One final note, I know there may of been a lot of information there to take in, In my opinion films that advertise like this are going to be more successful  at the box office and gain a bigger fan base because there is so much mystery around the film. And come on lets face it......... who doesn't like a good mystery?