“Premiere Night is Every Night”
What was the last movie you watched on Netflix? Midnight in Paris? Moonrise Kingdom? Or maybe you watched the Netflix Original Mudbound? It would be hard for me to guess what you watched, or what you will watch, and not just because they have a huge library of content. What shows up on your recommended list will be entirely different from mine, unless you also have a thing for romantic comedies mixed with Korean revenge thrillers. With every new film I watch, Netflix’s algorithm updates and creates a profile for what film I may enjoy next. Using this algorithm offers new techniques in marketing films. Netflix has been able to create a new way to bring a film to the attention of their viewers.
Most film distributors want the film to be released in theaters. To get people into the seats of the theater, a lot of traditional marketing strategies are used. For example, a trailer will be released, on average, 4 months prior to the showing of the film. Posters of the upcoming film will litter the hallways of theaters. Billboards of the film are placed throughout LA. And maybe a website for the film will be created. All of these strategies are commonplace, and they seem to work for reaching a broader audience of theater goers. Since Netflix does not premiere it’s films in theaters, do they still make billboards, posters, trailers and such? Would those marketing strategies be beneficial towards getting people to pick that film out of many others on the website/app?
Netflix does still use some of the more traditional forms of marketing for their Netflix Original films. For example, its hard to miss the Netflix billboards throughout town. Netflix does release at least one trailer for their films, but these trailers are often released very close, 2–3 weeks before the film makes it onto the streaming service (Thilk). On the other hand, these strategies seem to take a backseat to another forms of marketing. Netflix is not trying to get a large general audience in theater seats, and they are not trying to create event films through their marketing. These more traditional strategies would be a waste of money, since the film can be accessed anywhere with a subscription to their streaming service.
The real way Netflix markets their films is through Netflix itself, through their recommendation software. This can be seen in the way they use an algorithm to market their Original film Bright starring Will Smith. “‘Every title on Netflix is watched, and catalogued, across several hundred different elements,’ vice president of UI innovation Chris Jaffe says. ‘That data is then fed into our algorithm, so we have our own organic data set, then our algorithms are able to get a sense of it,’” (Bishop). After the initial cataloguing, and after its been watched by numerous people, the algorithm is able create “recommendations” based on other films that a person watched. To market Bright, Netflix surfaced clips of the film targeted to specific viewers (Bishop). They created different trailers that presented different genres of the film that would be shown to people depending on their genre leaning (Bishop). At the end, Netflix does not need to focus purely on the initial week of the film’s release, the algorithm will be working tirelessly to promote their films for their entirety of their life on the streaming service.
Works Cited
Thilk. Chris. “The Movie Marketing Blog: How Netflix does — or doesn’t — market its original movies.” The Drum. 10 April 2017. Web.
Bishop. Bryan. “How Netflix is trying to rewrite movie marketing with Bright.” The Verge. 19 Dec. 2017. Web.
