[Filmfestivalresearch] BUILDING A FILM FESTIVAL (Michael Guillen)

[Kyna Morgan]

Hi Michael,

How interesting to treat the SVFF's development as a case study!  I'm sure
this could be useful to many other small festival programmers whose fests
are just being created or continuing to grow.

I work as a film publicist and as a marketing director for an educational
foundation.  In my experience -- and much of this is also true if you read
PR blogs or anything published by the Public Relations Society of America
-- if you don't have an objectives-based marketing & PR strategy with
specific tactics to achieve your objectives, not much of what you do will
help. Some helpful resources to learn how to do these things (and every
festival should have a person or team to do them), include:

PR Daily  http://www.prdaily.com
Public Relations Society of America  http://www.prsa.org/
Sheri Candler (who does indie film marketing & publicity)
https://twitter.com/shericandler
Jon Reiss (who wrote the now-classic "Think Outside the Box Office" with
lessons for indie filmmakers which could easily be applied to film fests)
http://jonreiss.com/blog/

And just watching other film festivals, large and small, on twitter and
facebook and their blogs, can be helpful in gleaning information about the
pros and cons and what works and what doesn't.


I googled SVFF (regular search & "news" search), visited the Twitter &
Facebook pages and read every page of the SVFF website.  My assessment, if
this might be helpful to you at all, is that the problem -- or hurdles as
you call them -- with the festival not getting much out-of-state attention
lies in the area of marketing and public relations.  This would be true
whether you were launching a film festival or a yoga studio or a tech
company.  In my professional opinion, the things the festival should be
doing hold true pretty much across industries, and there are numerous
resources from which you can glean information on marketing with also
specific target areas under the "marketing umbrella," including public
relations, publicity (getting stories in the press), branding, utilizing
social media, website navigability, presentation of information (the SVFF
site doesn't link many things, for example, such as the mention of "Celeste
& Jesse Forever" which was a big hit at Sundance in 2012!)

All the best,
Kyna Morgan



On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 6:00 AM, <
filmfestivalresearch-request at listcultures.org> wrote:

> BUILDING A FILM FESTIVAL (Michael Guillen)