1. Introduction

1.1. Academic Background

Promotion has become one of the most important parts of marketing in the film industry. Film studios spend a lot of money to create a promotion campaign for new films. Without a good promotion strategy potential customers do not have accurate information or have no information at all about movies which are shown in cinemas. As a result, the number of viewers can be drastically reduced and the company loses money (Discovery Channel, 2011). Film studios rely on new blockbusters to compensate for the losses which they had on other films.

Hollywood has been dominating the global film industry since the early part of the 20^th century. The US cinema industry has developed innovative cinematic technologies; they also have large budgets for films and employ many professionals who work in the film industry and promotion. According to Screenvillie (2009) cinema attendance in the USA constitutes nearly 1.5 billion viewers per year while, by comparison, in Russia only 500 million.

Hollywood films are sold all over the world and very few countries can compete with the USA in that respect (Kerrigan, 2010). Russian films, on the other hand, are more popular in the art film world than with mass audience, which means far fewer viewers. Other than the low number of viewers, there are other problems in the industry that are related to lower business results, one is poor marketing and the other is the lack of export opportunities due to little demand from abroad (Gindilis, 2012, cited in Duvernet, 2012). According to Plakhov (2012) the Russian film industry is ready for any change that would help popularize Russian films worldwide.

Change and popularisation can take many forms, including improved promotion techniques. The aim of this dissertation therefore is to investigate the applicability of American film promotion practices to Russian film distribution.

There has not been much published research in the academic literature about Russian film promotion. In a recent article Van Gorp (2011) analysed Russian films made in post-Soviet Russia from the point of view of the importance of Russian national identity, however her work does not address film promotion strategies. In another recently published work Yakovenko (2011) is looking at how film markets in general are influenced by major players in the film industry with the main focus being on the aesthetics of film making rather than on the marketing aspect. Different aspects of the Russian film industry, including film promotion and distribution, were scrutinised by Barraclough (2013) blaming the government and the Ministry of Culture for not providing sufficient funding for those activities.

As is exemplified by the sources listed above previous research studies in general did not focus on film promotion. This dissertation therefore will be giving an overall picture of film promotion in Russia and aims to find new solutions to existing problems.

1.2. Key Terms

1.2.1. Film Promotion

Promotion is one of among the 4Ps in marketing: product, place, price and promotion. Promotion is important for all businesses because it helps potential customers to get to know their products and services. The strategies of promotion depend on the particular market, industry and on the mission of the company. A promotional mix includes three distinct media for promotion; they are ATL (above the line), BTL (below the line) and TTL (through the line). The line in this context describes “Focused marketing and level of interest” or “Awareness focused marketing”. Also “the Line” refers to the profit of the agency, for example, ATL advertisement being more profitable for advertising agencies because this kind of media is expensive (Broderick and Pickton, 2005). ATL is an advertisement visible in many places, such as, on TV, billboards or in the street. BTL includes sales promotion, sponsorship, public relations and direct media, and TTL represents a mix of ATL and BTL and includes corporate social responsibility and social media (Hackley, 2012). Branding also plays an important role in promotion because famous brands always attract more attention (Ailawadi et al., 2006). In this dissertation the focus will be on the different areas of film promotion, such as trailers and posters in theaters, television and radio advertisement, Internet advertisement which includes viral marketing and social media marketing, print advertisement in magazines and newspapers, merchandising and promotional tours of film creators and actors.

According to Kerrigan (2010) the film promotion includes pre-release, release and post-release strategies. The audience research should be done at the pre-release stage but the most important film promotional stages are the release and post-release strategies because only at these stages could filmmakers and distributors recover their money and some film companies do not have enough time or budget for audience research.

According to Elliott and Simmons (2011) companies all over the world use some basic types of movie promotion, such as trailers at cinemas, or on TV, print advertising on posters and in journals, merchandising which includes using T-shirts, books, games, toys and the Internet, such as YouTube, websites and online ads. Large and successful companies outside the film world are also contributing to film promotion, for example, “Pringles” launched a promotion campaign for the “Star Wars” series in 2004. The company created new packaging for their products which depicted the main characters of the film (Marketing Week, 2005).

The word-of-mouth advertisement is one of the most common ways of promoting films (Duan et al., 2008). Many people prefer to hear about new movies from their friends or read reviews written by professional critics. Potential customers are also visiting websites such as www.rottentomatoes.com or the Russian website www.kinopoisk.ru which also publish professional reviews (Addis and Holbrook, 2008). Since Internet promotion started to develop from 1999 many film promotion companies created their own websites where they use pictures, games and trailers to attract viewer attention (Zufryden, 2000). However, there are many professionals in the film industry, who do not yet take advantage of this type of film promotion.