Promoting Paranormal Activity

Hadiya Faheem (ICMR Centre for Management Research)

Advertising & Sales Promotion

Presented By:
Abhishek Gupta Anubhav Sharma Prashant Chauhan Uttam Kumar Mishra Vaibhav Sharma

Achieving Abnormal Success

Low budget film with hand held camera No star actors and no big name director Budget of $15000 Raging hit earning staggering $65 million. Horror film- made by an Israeli video game designer Oren Peli Released by Paramount Pictures Corporation One of the highest revenue earning low budget films in Hollywood

The Making of Paranormal Activity

Renovated his house-planned to shoot the film in his house. Founded Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat after auditioning over 100 peple. Featherston feels that a ghost had been haunting her house since she was an eight year old kid. When she moves to the house of her boyfriend, Sloat- felt that something strange going on in the house at night. To find out, Sloats sets up video cameras to shoot the happenings in the house at night.

Initial hiccups`
Peli collaborated with Creative Artists Agency to showcase the film at the 2007 Screamfest Horror Film Festival- Success. Denied entry into the Sundane Film Festival, eventually no key distributors came out to distribute it. In early 2008, DreamWorks acquired domestic and remake rights for Paranormal Activity and international rights were acquired by IM Global. Goodman held the free screening of the film at Burban and invited a few script writers to test but abandoned their plans to remake the film. DreamWorks made a shorter version of the film with the ending. But the release of the film got delayed after trouble started between DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures. DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures decided to split and stalled the release of Paranormal Activity. Blum and Peli decided to screen it at a theater in Santa Monica for international buyers in November 2008.

Promotional Strategies
Film was made on low budget, Paramount Pictures planned to adopt unique and unconventional marketing tactics to promote it

Marketing budget had been only on building the website and setting up screenings to create a buzz for Paramount Activity.

Harnessing the Power of Buzz Marketing and Social Media

Screened the film at the Labor Day Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Sep 09 Hosting midnight screenings in 13 college towns Computers were placed in theater lobbies to encourage viewers of the film to Tweet their Screams and to join facebook Resultant WOM publicity sparked immense interest in people to watch the film After viewing the Internet buzz and web traffic, Paramount Pictures organized eight midnight screenings in those demographics Positive review published on movie blogs such as BloodyDisgusting.com, ComingSoon and Fear.net

Demand It Campaign

Paramount Pictures launched website, www.paranormalmovie.com Feature on website Demand It campaign Clicked on tab, directed to an eventful page where user could vote for the release of the film in his/her city Studio announced that once the demand touched a million votes the film would release nationalwide

When Your City Gets Enough Demands You WILL Be The First To Experience The Terror

 Contains Twitter Bird Icon Tweet Your Scream Clicking on the page directed to Twitter where after login user could post a message regarding what had driven him/her to click on the Demand It tab Also included facebook page, that consisted of a list of people demanding the film to be released, also posted some videos and photos from the film Exponential growth with demands going up to 300000 in Sept 09

Poster
Single Poster of Film Includes a strip that clearly showed that story had been captured by a simple video camera due to its coarse look Hype created by Quote: Scariest Movie of All Times Bottom promoted film as an event that required involvement from people Demand It

Trailer
Focused more on audience than on shots from the film Urging the audience to demand the release of the film their city by participating in the Demand It Campaign Paranormal Activity Trailer

Midnight Screening Tweets, writing on social networking sites and writing blogs by Midnight viewers. Selling Paranormal activity more as an experience than a film.

1. According to Adam Wagler: These marketing techniques caused a supply and demand feel for this movie. Its like the people who get to see this movie are like the popular kids in class . They have something that nobody else does, and in this case , they saw this movie when many people havent yet. 2. According to Greenstein: when people saw the movie, they loved it so much and there is such a slow build of terror that you have to sit through to experience the full effect of the movie, so we have changed the marketing techniques in advertising and online to make it more experiential.

Critics: This isnt some piece of propaganda thats so dangerous that movie theaters are refusing to show it, or even so potentially unpopular that theaters dont want to show it. This is a movie distributor looking for some way to create publicity about itself. They are pretending there is some distribution obstacle that peoples popular demand is going to overcome. Increasing the no of screen from 160 to 2000 after watching the success of the film and Ford said, I did not imagine that it would become such a phenomenon. What I did know was that there was something unique and scary about it.

Top 10 most used terms on twitter in mid October 2009. It was also appeared on Twitters most popular trending topics Flixter said that it received 5000 individual reviews about the film in October in 2009.

Flixter CEO: A movie fueled by not only by positive critical response, but by the buzz, feedback, and word of mouth response generated by movie goers who get information and make decision online driven by what their friends and acquaintances says. Film critic Owen gleiberman gave the film A- grade and said with its this-is really-happening vibe, paranormal activity scraps away 30 years of encrusted nightmare cliches. The fear is real, all right because the fear is really is in you.

Thank You