Thursday, June 7, 2012

Trailer Marketing – PSYOP Food For Thought


The Thursday, May 30, 2012 edition of Variety ran an article “Building a better buzz clip” (http://www.variety.com/features/trailers/) provided insight on how short video clips reinforce the “traditional three waves of conventional trailers and are designed to ignite a virtual buzz”. (Also the photo source.)

Too often we get mired in the world of leaflets and loudspeakers. As events like the Arab Spring and “Occupy” swirl around us we need to stop for a moment and do a bit of creative thinking. If the objective is to influence a market that has access to technology (not necessarily a mainstream assumption by the way), then we in the influence community need to consider new ways of getting our messages out and of leveraging the traditionally un-leverageable.

The objective of the shorter piece is to entice people to get engaged talking about it. The conversation and any others that spring from that conversation are ‘the buzz’. That is they are spreading the message presumably by messengers who are far more credible to the recipient than the original producer of the short video. In our case getting citizens, particularly those in the teen/young adult demographic to ‘buzz’ about our messages would be a real coup.

The Hollywood types also pointed out that this kind of ‘collateral video’ is “relatively inexpensive to distribute online since it is not a paid ad. These mini teasers have a variety of names such as non-standard units, special clips, buzz clips, side stores and collateral videos according to the article.

A complementary article “Trailer trends capitalize on a sense of déjà vu” (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118054512) offers some techniques to increase the effectiveness of the piece to include sound design elements, music, pace, etc.

The point is simple, if we consider the PSYOP/MISO field a creative endeavor, then we need to exercise our own creativity on a regular basis.

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