How to market a documentary:

Marketing a documentary is one of the most important things to do even before you start to
make your production. Marketing a production isn’t as easy as making a trailer or a poster,
this is because you need to work out the most effective way of targeting your audience and
also plan the distribution where what and how. Planning the marketing and distribution of
your film can happen before you start filming. But the main release of things like trailers
have to be done usually a year prior to the final date of release of the production. The
marketing techniques of a documentary/production has changed a lot throughout the years.
From the first documentary made in 1922 Nanook of the North by Robert J. Flaherty being
advertised with flyers and newspapers to the modern-day documentary like Blue planet
being shown through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube. But why have they
changed so much and how?

Before we see how documentaries were marketed back in 1922 we must first understand the
definition of marketing and the history of documentaries. If you look at the oxford languages
it states that Marketing is: “The activity or business of promoting and selling products or
services, including market research and advertising.”

Looking at this definition we instantly see something that happens in the pre-production of
documentaries which is the market research. In this documentary research they need to find
out what they are making their documentary about, something that stands out to them and is
interesting, how they will advertise this and also who the target is for this documentary. The
main chunk of research would go towards the topic as it is the thing you have to get right. You
can do this through researching on the internet, speaking to people about the topic and also
through books, this is especially good research if you are making a documentary on a topic or
situation that happened before the internet. In this research most producers would want to find
the interviewees. Not all documentaries have people being interviewed but if they do then you
would want to find interesting characters that are still very relevant to the thing you are making
the documentary on.

During this pre-production stage you should also find out what narration style you want to use
for example:

Interview-led: This is where documentaries are based on interviews with relevant key people
typically used to explore a particular issue or event.

Narrator-led: Documentaries can use narrators to guide the viewer, often providing added
information and views that wouldn’t be possible through other techniques such as interview-
led.

These are only a few examples of narration, but it is important to remember that documentaries
would usually take aspects from at least two types so you shouldn’t feel like your limited to one
type.

As the company’s work, out their narration and topic they would also being a deep research
analysis of their chosen target audiences. For marketing the people, you are going to target are
by far the most important bit of market research you will do. This is because if you can’t target
the audience well you aren’t going to be getting consumers of your product and essentially
without consumers the product becomes inevitably unsuccessful. Target audience research can
be done in a number of ways. Through secondary or primary, through posters or through social
media. But what are the main principles of Advertisement?

A good way to remember the main principles of advertisement through my own research is
through AIDA. It stands for:

Attention- Grab people’s attention by standing out and through interesting headlines and drive
traffic to your product.

Interest- Frame content that makes the reader want to read and learn more. Avoid clichés and
meaningless buzzwords.

Desire- Outline the benefits to make people want to buy. Show them what’s in it for them.

Action- Include a call to action. Don’t leave any doubt in their mind to not act-now!

But why have we changed so much when we market productions when we look back?

The way advertisement has changed ultimately comes down to the resources that has been
available and what is “trending” in the time that you are making your documentary. Just like any
trend they come and go so that’s why so much in-depth marketing research happens and also
why it changes over time. If we look at some examples from the first documentary’s we can see
that Nanook of the North was advertised through physical copies of mass printed posters and
newspaper advertisements.

This documentary was released in 1922 so obviously back then. There was no internet or social
media so advertising a production back then has a lot more limits then in today’s society. As you
can see on the newspaper article they use many principles of advertisement. For example, they
achieve the attention principle by using an image of what you can expect which is also relevant
to the interest principle because people may look at the picture and think that they want to
learn more about the topic. They also use a box around “taken in the actual Arctic” this would
have been an important thing for people to see to generate interest as the documentary was
released in New York city so a lot of people would have never been to the arctic before, some
may have not even heard of it. They also use punctuation when the publisher puts the
exclamation mark after “Actual Arctic” this makes it look urgent as if the people who see this
article HAVE to go and see this documentary as soon as possible.

If you then look at the poster to the left since it wasn’t printed onto a newspaper so they could
get people’s attention through other ways as they had access to colour. Colour in advertising is
very important because not only can it help show what sort of thing they are advertising e.g.
Green could be considered environmentally positive or even healthy if you were advertising
food. They use the colour red in the Title to make it stand out and grab the reader’s attention as
it is the thing that they want the reader to retain the most memory of as it’s the title. I think they
chose the colour red not only to make it stand out but to also symbolise power as right next to
the title there is a powerful looking angry wolf. This might increase people’s interest as they
want to know what an angry wolf has to do with it as it gives them a hint at what they can
expect during the documentary.

As I talked about earlier the whole advertising and marketing of documentary’s has changed so
much so if we look at a later example of a documentary we can see how much it has changed to
keep up with what’s relevant and trending.

If we look at the Oscar winning 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams by Steve James we can really
see not just how advertisement has changed but also how both the method and technology has
changed. Cinema in the 90’s was revolutionary with emerging directors like Tarantino and
Fincher. So, Steve James knew he had to do something to stand out. Thus, making a ground-
breaking documentary about the 5-year journey of two ambitious basketball playing African
Americans wanting to someday play in the NBA. How would they market such a massive
production that took 6 years to film?

The way that this was marketed completely differently was through the productions Trailers.
This is something that was effective due to the fact that in the 90’s cinema was so prominent. If
we look at the trailer the first thing we notice is the long line that leave the watcher in suspense.
The suspenseful feeling is also increased by the use of music. What’s interesting is they leave the
quote on a loose end as seen below:
This is
something that’s completely different to Nanook of the north as the first thing you saw was the
title of the documentary. The statement finishes at the end of the trailer when it says the title
Hoop Dreams. The shots that the trailer uses are especially emotional, shots when people are
crying, between slow fades that really show the emotional conflict that happens during this
movie. One thing this trailer does really well is showing the viewer what to expect as I touched
on earlier the emotions that the characters are going to experience but also the story. They
show the story mainly through the narration, but it also makes it feel very tense from the way
the narrator speaks and also the words that he uses.

If you compare Hoop Dreams with Nanook of the North you can see how different they are
when it c0mes to marketing but also how they still both use the principles of marketing whether
they make a poster or a trailer.