Marketing at the Florida Film Festival

At the Festival, the most important part of our marketing plan went in to play: the face-to-face contact with festival attendees. We showed up early on opening night at Regal and were able to hand out a huge portion of our flyers. We scattered ourselves between the theatre and some of the other storefronts in the immediate area. People had questions because of the huge crowd gathered for the premiere of Renee, giving us a unique opportunity to explain the Festival and our film to a large group of non-festival folk.

The day of our first showing, we arrived after lunch at the Enzian, although our film was screening at Regal later that night. Our plan was to hit those unique moviegoers who are already predisposed to attending in the afternoon, which we knew we would need for our second screening. We hid a huge number of our frogs around the property (see appendix), and the response was immediate- we were and still are quite pleased with how they were received by the general public. It later became clear that our efforts that afternoon had paid off as we saw several of these people at later screenings. The rest of that afternoon we spent at Regal up until show time. 

About 15 minutes before the screen lit up for the first time, the nice people at the ticketing table responded to my question regarding the number of tickets still available with a succinct, “Two.” Those quickly sold and most of the tickets held in reserve for VIPs up until showtime were sold as well.

The next few days we went back to the festival in ones just to keep our presence felt, hit it hard on Wednesday with the frogs and flyers, and again were pleased at the great turn out.

We freely admit that we were aided in our efforts immensely by the respective fan bases of Robin Tunney and Adam Scott. In terms of our online presence, our twitter, while active, did not seem to be the driving force behind the attendance. The official FB page, maintained by the filmmakers, did seem to garner some awareness. For sure though, a strong local push makes all the difference in the world.

And rubber frogs.