The making of a blockbuster
Marketing and publicity campaigns have come of age in Bollywood. Remember Aamir Khan turning promote Ghajini or Salman Khan participating in wrestling matches in the run up to the Dabangg release? But it is a relatively lesser-known fact that the marketing campaigns of both these blockbusters were handled by specialist film marketing and publicity firms - Spice, Raindrop Media. "In the past five years, film marketing has certainly come of age in Bollywood with innovative marketing techniques being used across various mediums," says Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO, UTV Motion Pictures.
With the opening weekend becoming critical for the box-office success of movies, producers are now setting aside big budgets for marketing films. There is also a growing clamour for specialist firms. For a small budget film, the marketing cost could be equivalent to the cost of the film. For a big budget film, very often, it is 30 per cent of the overall cost of the film. "Today's audiences have a limited attention span. A movie has to make an impact on the first day of release. Its fortune is decided in threefour days," says Rohini Iyer, Founder and MD, Raindrop Media, which has recently handled the marketing and publicity campaigns of blockbusters like LSD, Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and Dabangg.
"The marketing thought process starts integrating with the overall process at the script stage itself. We start thinking marketing at the green lighting stage itself," says UTV'S Kapur. Apart from 3 Idiots and Dabangg, which were both big-starrers and essentially big films, one of the best examples of how powerful marketing can be today is Peepli Live. A small, realistic film without any item numbers, its opening day receipts were at least twice as big as some of the big star cast films released during this period.
"Innovative promos of the film resonated with the consumers. The film would have otherwise gone unnoticed as yet another good small film, but it was the sheer force of marketing that catapulted that film to another orbit altogether," says Prabhat Choudhary, Head of Spice.
The entry of specialists is a relatively new phenomenon in Bollywood, but given their recent success the trend is likely to gather momentum. Arbaaz Khan, producer of Dabangg, sums it up succinctly: "Marketing and promotion is an important aspect of the film, but it is not the only thing that drives a film's success. If the content is not accepted by the audience, marketing alone will not work."
