How do most Yash Raj Films movies manage to succeed at the box office? Is it because they are great scripts? Or is it because Yash Raj Films spend a fortune on marketing their movies?
They sure know how to smartly package a movie. The result? An otherwise average movie opens to great weekend collections all over the world thanks to the initial hype created by the excellent promotions. In fact around 40 to 50% of the total budget of the movie is actually spent on promoting the movie.
This is a very good tactic because it ensures that the producer (or Distributors as the case may be) recovers his or her investment by the time the talk spreads about how good or bad the movie is.
These movies depend solely on the first weekend collections. In nine of ten cases, the opening weekend tickets are sold out well in advance. This is because by the time the movie hits the marquee every Tom Dick and Harry in any corner of the country know even the minutest details about the movie.
Switch on the TV and you see an interview with the lead actor in one channel, a Page 3 report on something related to the movie in the next channel and a staple diet of the movie’s songs in the third. Enough about the idiot box. Grab your newspaper – You see reports after reports on how this movie is made.
Interestingly, there is this “Est” factor. People talk about their movie and use words ending with “Est” liberally. (Best movie, Scariest time of my life, Funniest experiences…) This superlative “performance” of the media partners works big time for the movie.
Recently while watching a Hindi movie, I was amazed to see the number of media partners the movie had. The titles flashed at least twenty partners!
Compare this with the Telugu movie industry. Most of the movies in Telugu suffer from inefficient publicity. The professional approach Hindi movies adopt is missing in Telugu. While some movies are bogged down by over publicity, others have practically zero publicity.
When I mentioned this to a friend, he opined that perhaps the Telugu movie makers were scared of creating a hype – which might work against the movie.
What differentiates Hype from Publicity? You can’t hype a movie but you can publicize it. Smart packaging of the movie’s prerelease media exposure is called “Publicity” while elevating the movie to the zenith purely based on the actors/technicians involved amounts to creating Hype.
The differentiation aforesaid is off my hat. I am sure the line dividing these two is very thin and quite fuzzy. Clear definition of Hype and Publicity maybe not possible. However we can very well tilt the equation heavily towards smart publicity – by taking a leaf or two from the marketing cookbooks used in Bollywood… especially by Yash Raj Films.
Source: India FM
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