PRODUCERS

Making Film Audience Research Is Vital To Your Film Production

There has never been a better time to be a movie producer, the film industry acquisition potential has increased dramatically with the rise of many new streaming platforms. The movie business is rapidly changing but there's a tradeoff: streaming outlets tend not to share their results, which makes fair negotiation impossible. It's time for film producers to take control of their film marketing strategy, to develop their own movie marketing plan to help define the film's success by taking the first steps in making film audience research.

Identify your Audience and their Motivations in the Pre Production Phase

Today's Audiences are overwhelmed with film and tv show choices. Our film insights team can help with all aspects of your film marketing strategies to help make your film production stand out, by monitoring conversations across the web and social media to determine how they will interact with the themes and topics of your feature film. Even if you are at the very beginning of the pre production phase we can research the plot lines & themes, the potential cast, etc, to provide advice on those factors that will guide the filmmaking process and ultimately resonate with the movie's target audience.

Film Audience Research

Unlock Film Audience Insights and Monitor them in Real-time

Understanding your film's target audience is vital for the process of developing a successful film marketing campaign and film promotion strategies through the movie production phase and into the film's release, sentiment-dedicated either as film festival announcements, a domestic theatrical release, or directly to the home entertainment, as well as understanding the potential reach and appeal of your film production. Our film insights team can create audience sentiment dedicated dashboards and reports that display the impact of any movie marketing activity, from movie trailer & poster launches, film festivals, press releases, etc, to word-of-mouth events that are discussed by your community across social media. This allows you to continually monitor the impact of your promotional tactics, news, and all information relevant to your film.

Ad Tools — Martech

Landing Pages
Social Players
Showtimes Banners
Website
Embedded
Facebook Tab

Create the ultimate destination for your independent film or feature film marketing campaigns with Gruvi’s fully-responsive film marketing website. This technology is equipped with movie target audience tracking tools to monitor and improve the media buy, and a raft of interactive features that take advantage of the film's promotional materials. These include geo-located showtimes, reminder functionality, watch/subscribe options, movie trailers, games, quizzes, galleries, and more.

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  • Showtimes
  • Quiz
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  • HTML5

Use the website as part of a PR or influencer outreach strategy.  The Gruvi website is embeddable across a variety of platforms, to help enhance organic outreach efforts. No matter where the website is placed, all interactions are tracked in real time on the Gruvi Analytics Dashboard.

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Make the full website available in the menu of your Facebook fan page, as a tab. Especially useful if you’re working with a bigger catalogue, it allows regular customers to access schedule information, links to ticketing or VOD at any time in your fan page menu.

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James Bond LP Screenshot

Put your messages and your point of sale where your audiences engage the most: in their newsfeed. Gruvi’s social widgets work alongside the promoted video on Facebook, Instagram, Snap and Twitter, where they serve most of the landing page features (such as movie showtimes and ticketing to quizzes and much more) directly into the newsfeed.

Facebook
Twitter
Snapchat
TikTok
Instagram

The Gruvi Facebook ad player includes some of the most important features of the landing page, conveniently displayed if the user interacts with a video ad when using the Facebook Mobile App.

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Gruvi’s offering on Twitter highlights our localised showtimes listings and also gives users the chance to view video content.

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Gruvi’s format for Snap Ads couples an attention-grabbing top snap with showtimes, allowing users to explore cinemas and book tickets in an experience fully customisable according to brand image. The Gruvi Snap Ads can also be used to link out to VoD, SVOD or rental.

Features
  • Video
  • Showtimes
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    Desktop
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    Mobile
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The Gruvi Facebook ad player includes some of the most important features of the landing page, conveniently displayed if the user interacts with a video ad when using the Facebook Mobile App.

Features
  • Video
  • Showtimes
  • Quiz
  • Gallery
  • Synopsis
Support
    Desktop
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    Mobile
Technology
  • HTML5

Gruvi’s Instagram ad unit is built around showtimes listings, with video clips available upon request.

Features
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  • Showtimes
  • Quiz
  • Gallery
  • Synopsis
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Want to reach your audiences outside of social media? Gruvi’s widgets can adapt to any video friendly desktop or mobile format to reach core audiences programmatically on publishers' sites and apps across the internet.  As a certified rich-media vendor, the Gruvi platform auto-generates rich media banners for web/ mobile display and mobile apps in a variety of formats. These banners include video and showtimes, ticketing, etc. Available as click-to-play or auto-start with roll over audio.

Supported formats

Banner examples

300 x 600
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Advanced Media Planning: The Audience Project (TAP)

The Audience Project (TAP) is a bespoke film audience database and media planning service that allows the filmmaker & movie marketing team to understand the potential audience reach & impact of their film's themes to help develop tailored & bespoke film marketing plan.

Partly funded by Creative Europe, the system exploits knowledge gained from our 3,000+ film campaigns, coupled with first-party data from select exhibitors and VOD partners. Media planning helps you make the most of your marketing strategy by factoring in the fluctuating costs of media, the time of year, the impact of competing titles, how audiences have reacted to similar films in the past, the box office revenue of previous film releases, the impact of good or bad weather conditions, and much more. This, in turn, helps movie producers understand a title's potential revenue, potential media spend for PR activities, and the risks of launching a film from a timing strategy perspective.

International Film Marketing and Media Strategy Services

From large features to independent films, or whether you choose to self-promote or work with distribution partners, we can help with all stages of your film's commercial release. TAP’s media planning will identify the correct film marketing plan from the channel or social media strategy that will work best, to the ideal P&A costs for the marketing budget, as well as set benchmarks for monitoring outcomes from advertising channels, and identify relevant audience behavioral segments to help boost the campaign performance (typically between 3 and 5X).

Gruvi’s expert ad operations and design teams will advise you on which elements of your movie trailers, clips should be used for the campaign, to generate the greatest impact.

Film Target Audience

Tracking your Film Marketing in Realtime

All TAP (The Audience Project) marketing campaigns are built around a live reporting dashboard that tracks all aspects of the advertising and its results. This provides a valuable insight into how well your film is likely to perform over its opening weekend. Realtime reporting allows you to make better decisions based on real-time business intelligence by orientating the advertising to focus on the factors that drive the film's success for even the most niche of independent film.

Ready to discuss about your next movie release?

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The Film Production FAQ

What's the benefit of Film Audience Research?

Our film marketing service investigates your film target audience size, what motivates them, and where they communicate on social media. All this data helps de-risk each stage of the film production and film distribution process from film festivals through to cinema release by helping you:

1. Spot winning strategies early that yield huge benefits & wins downstream of the film's release

2. Identify trends in pop culture that resonate with your audience (i.e. Korean Production and creative powerhouse)


3. Choose the right titles to invest in

4. Identify those key elements of the story that maximise audience appreciation & engagement

5. Understand the potential core audience to best exploit in the marketing phase of distribution, to maximise sales performance at the box office

6. Avoid wasting resources and budget on things that simply don't work

7. And perhaps most importantly: identify the features in your film that ensure your work stands out from the competition

How long does it take to develop a film marketing plan?

If you are a production company seeking alternatives to the usual way of releasing movies in the digital age, and you are unsure that the big screen is the right format for your film, then take advantage of our consultancy and book yourself a call with one of the team to better understand today's media market and audience for your film.

Initial research phases take anything between 5 to 12 working days. During that time we will review the film's themes & core concepts, marketing materials & trailers, and develop a target list of other films to gauge benchmarks. At the end of this phase, we will provide a detailed report for your production company.

Once your film is ready for launch or commercialization the process of media planning is automated by TAP, so we can develop media plans within 1 to 2 business working days, giving you the cost breakdowns of reaching your movie target audiences on social media and other digital channels, and how likely they are to engage with the ads and consequently buy tickets or downloads/streams.

Do you have testimonials from the Production industry?

Many filmmakers, film distributors, and sales agents have used the services mentioned above. If you would like to see a demonstration or read through a testimonial, please don't hesitate to get in touch or check out the case studies on our blog.

How does your research influence the Production budget?

Filmmakers: your movie's production and digital marketing budgets are developed by talking and brokering deals with film investors. Investments seek a return: by being able to show the size and reach of your audience you will be able to demonstrate demand, by understanding past performance you will be able to better defend your business case, and finally: you will be able to justify and detail the marketing budget that will be needed to attract your type of audience.

How do you select the appropriate social media platforms?

Our audience insights team collects information from your potential film target audience by analyzing their social media chatter through tools like Brandwatch and Watson AI. This provides you with information on:

1. How large your potential core audience base is

2. What the sentiments are around the topics featured in your movie

3. Which social media channels do they use

4. How they are posting content on social media

How do you determine which promotional materials to use for your film marketing plan?

Your electronic press kit which contains your movie trailer and clips, press releases, clips, lobby stills, etc all help tell the story about your film and are important components of your film marketing strategy. Through the film audience research, we can help define your creative strategy, and with Gruvi design team we can build those creatives, including the film trailer and website.

Does this service work for independent films or is it only suitable for major studios titles?

Our service was built off of working on thousands of independent film marketing campaigns over the years. We have worked at all stages of the movie production cycle, and our audience insights have been invaluable in pinpointing audiences and strategies that genuinely drive sales. Check out our blog or case studies section to see more.

The media planning that results from our research also pinpoints the costs of engagement in your film's marketing campaign long before discussions with independent film distributors or VOD acquisition teams occur. This can be used to leverage budget negotiations, and revenue splits more aggressively in your favor to ensure a greater chance of box office success.

How do I keep the audience engaged when my film is not even made yet?

From the audience analysis, we will be able to direct you on your setup and use of your own social media accounts to keep the story and engagement alive even during production, and the phases your film moves through before it finally ends up hitting local theaters. The movie audience research also helps you tailor the right tone in your press release work.

When should I start working on my movie marketing campaign?

Today's online media market is a crowded place, there are more films and tv shows, and they are all vying for prime position in today's online attention economy. Our advice is to begin your marketing investigations as soon as possible, in order to have an important competitive advantage over other filmmakers.

How does audience data help my campaigns?

Gruvi worked on the theatrical release of the independent film “Parasite” in six different territories over the course of eight months. Using behavioral data from the previous campaigns helped us ensure that each subsequent release delivered better results than its predecessors.

I am Operating on a limited budget

Our audience insights Basic Analysis package starts for as little as $4000, a comparatively low figure when you compare it to the costs associated with writing an unfocused script, hiring the wrong cast and crew, under leveraging an important plotline, not raising enough money, developing an underwhelming trailer, etc.

As a movie producer, you are looking at potentially investing up to five years (and beyond!) of your life in the movie production process. Arming yourself with data and knowledge will save you time, money, and potential heartache while maximizing the profitability of your film release.

Collecting audience data is complicated and fragmented, time-consuming, and expensive

TAP gives you the same power to develop your independent film's marketing strategy that any large studio has. Visualize your required audiences, and inject them into the campaign at the right time: drive them to local cinemas or other viewing options (like VOD).

How do I know this research will be effective for my film promotion?

The balance between art and commerce is better hung from a model of understanding what your film's audience is interested in, and motivated by. If you would like to see testimonials from film marketers about our service or see relevant case studies, check out our blog.

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