THE NOTION OF PROMOTION

How do we Turn Our Indie Animation into Cold, Hard Cash?
Part V

So, in the last post in this series I mentioned that traditional style advertising was a mistake for my particular project. I also noted that by the time I got to my second DVD release, called Shadowskin, I found out that promotion, rather than advertising got me a lot further and cost me a lot less. So how do you do it?

Well, let me give an example. Sometime in 2003, I think, I was in LA and, at that time, still had no work outside of my own projects. Sales for my DVD projects were down to near zero. Then someone wrote to me and asked me about the Shadowskin DVD. They wanted to know if it contained the same type of behind the scenes content as the Chaos DVD. I was shocked. I just assumed that everyone knew the DVD would "show you how it was done" just like the last one. Well, I was wrong, and to my own detriment.

So how does one fix this oversight without an expensive advertising campaign? The answer was simple. I cut a new trailer. This time, instead of focusing on the animation alone, the traler showed many behind the scenes clips and featured narration from the extra features about how it was made, and then went into the cool animation clips. I put this trailer up on the web and made a simple announcement. The response was as big as when the DVD was first released, and sales were back to full steam. This move even helped spark new sales of the previous DVD, and it cost me nothing.

Advertising would have cost me a lot of money, which I didn't have, but that type of promotion cost the one thing the indie artist has plenty of, time and skill. The same were employed to make the show. Why not use them to their fullest to sell the show? Internet surfers likely skip right over big colorful banner ads with lots of gloss and phony hype. People on the web want information. The new trailer I cut provided information and not gloss, and it drove buyers to my webstore. Many of the major animation, computer graphics and manga websites carried images and a blurb about this new trailer release because websites want real news and real content, not corporate "hype machine" jibberish. Your audience also wants real news and real content.

Ever hear of a website called Kong is King? On this webite, Peter Jackson, director of the epic motion picture King Kong, posts news of the project and his production diaries. These are video diaries, showing an inside look at how the film is being made. Now we all know these features will appear on some uber edition of the DVD, so why post it on the web "as it happens"? Because this way, the user is there! This makes it real news and real information. It's free advertising! According to Video Business Weekly, extra features sell DVD's. People can rent a movie anytime, watch it and take it back, but extra features are why people buy the DVD. With this promotion, Peter Jackson is selling tons of DVD's before they even exist.

So what methods of promotion can you use? Try submitting artwork from your film to the many CG show-off sites out there. Not only is your work before hundreds of thousands of eyes, but so are links to your page offering more information. Develop relationships with the vendors of the software you use. One of the best things that happened to me was when companies like Newtek started using images and clips from my work, with links to my page, in their advertising. The makers of the software want great content to show that their users are doing great things with their tools. You get free advertising.

The reality is that the possibilities for promotion are limited only by the imagination. Now that I am done with the past, in the next few posts in this series, I am not only going to explain some of those possibilites in detail, I am going to point you to examples of those who promoted their way to major licensing deals.

More on that in the next post...

Comments?