It might seem like a situation of ‘grapes are sour’ when a film journalist, who perhaps tussles to get spots for celebrity interviews goes on to talk and critique how easily the same is provided to content creators or social media influencers – but the motive is to take an all-encompassing approach here. Movie promotions and their abundance have been a beast that seemingly all actors find tough to come to terms with. For many, it acts like that subject in school, which you hate/detest but need to study because there is no way surrounding it. However, there has been the flip side to movie promotions on an array of platforms and how they make an impact – there is never any assisting data that converts promotional activities to footfalls in theatres – but it is still done – mainly to be certain that maximum amount of people are aware.
On the one hand, the marketing team of a film needs to get the eventual expectations clear – is this slew of promotions being done to make sure that more and more people come to the theatres to watch the film or is it just to create awareness and thus resulting in ‘I tell you, you tell more’ saga? For some, it might seem stupid to even ask this because the end goal is to make sure that people come to the theatre, spend money and watch the film but as known, there is no certainty attached to it. That is not dependent on Murphy’s law – whatever can happen will happen. Hence, with the humongous boost of social media and content creators paving their way into the masses, the obvious choice for stars has become to resort to creating content with these content creators while subtly, and sometimes blatantly promoting their films.
In the past two to three years, this has been rampant where popular creators like Ashish Chanchlani, Ruhee Dosani, Niharika NM, Ranveer Allahbadia, Dharna Durga and more frequently create content with Bollywood stars in order to promote their respective films while also accentuate their presence. The downfall to this is a tricky situation to be in. A reel or a sketch video with a star that screams promotion is usually not well received despite having ‘reach’.
The ones accustomed to how insights on social media work would know that the success of any reel or video isn’t just dependent on the number of views that it has received but more so on the engagement. Several of these videos, despite having A-listers or conventionally popular stars aren’t able to result in the same engagement as others purely due to the already known phenomena – this is for a promotion. A creator like Ranveer Allahbadia though, has an edge over short content creators where the idea of having a popular actor sit down for a dedicated one hour, and talk about life leads to the kind of content that connects more often than not. It helps that the click-bait-hungry journalists have a field day and soon, from these clips, multiple headlines and articles are being generated. Podcasting has become more and more obvious but as of now, it enables just what the promotion is intended for – awareness, buzz and at times being converted to footfalls.
Another issue that lies with movie promotions with social media influencers is that the more frequent it gets, the lesser impact it makes. For instance, if you end up watching your favorite content creator promote a movie, or a star repeatedly, you gradually begin forming a disconnect from him/her and thus it defeats the purpose. You then need to rely on that promotional asset to go ‘viral’, which as we know, is beyond anyone’s control.
It isn’t to say that the film stars or the team attached are privy to what magnitude of an impact these reels or so create – they know! And on the other hand, lies the traditional interview set-up that all movie journalists offer and even though that also doesn’t necessarily convert into footfalls, it continues to be a practice that is followed more so like a tradition and even today, there are actors who look forward to it as well.
It doesn’t discard the fact that shooting for and creating content with creators for promoting your film is a bane but the assumption that it is a boon and almost certainly guarantees incredible reach and engagement thus more awareness is unfortunate – because that isn’t the case only because the said creator has millions of followers. To put that in perspective, if those millions and millions of followers were going to theatres to watch films based on what they see on social media – the actors who have a presence on several platforms and amass millions of people following them might never need to shoot or make any content with any other creator.
With changing times and changing ways, film promotions have become less and less about the film also owing to the decreasing attention span and hence the choice to do this is understandable. Whether it is always effective or not – the jury is still out.