In the entertainment industry, movie trailers are an important part of amping up the excitement for an upcoming motion picture. Whether they play in movie theaters ahead of the main feature or on TV screens during popular shows and events, trailers almost necessary lead to excited social media chatter and organic word-of-mouth marketing ahead of the movie’s release.
Initially, you may not think of your marketing videos as having a close connection to these event-based, short promotional pieces. But in fact, the art form of movie trailers provides many lessons for marketing, five of which we have outlined below.
1) Featuring the Music
Music plays a large part in any successful movie trailer. Because of the limited time available for in-depth storytelling, video producers seek to grab the audience from the first second with compelling music that matches the movie they try to promote.
The same should be true for marketing videos. Check out this time lapse promoting Tropicana Winter Sunshine, in which every beat is timed with the music underlying the images. The music itself is appropriately dynamic, without losing the light summer feeling that the brand tries to achieve.
2) Showing the Highlights
A movie trailer has a difficult proposition: catch the gist of the plot in just a couple of minutes. Typically, it does so using a combination of scenes from the upcoming movie and text overlay to explain the context and details.
Marketing video can use the same tools to achieve success. Showing the highlights of your brand, team, or event helps convey the excitement for it, while the text can provide the context your audience needs to understand these highlights. This hype video for the International Champions Cupis a perfect example of this interplay.
3) Connecting with Emotions
Both of the above points hint at an eternal truth of video production: to be successful, it has to connect with your audience’s emotions. If you can’t make your viewers feel a connection to your video footage, they will tune out before the 10 second mark.
Music and highlights both serve to make the emotional connection. But the most successful videos go beyond, making a connection through authentic storytelling that the audience can instantly relate to.
4) Exploring Perspectives
In movies as in any other type of marketing, simply showing the typical overview camera view is boring and will not grab your audience’s attention. Unique perspectives are necessary, whether we’re talking about POV camera angles, time lapse videos, detail shots, or more.
Film makers have long used trailers for their movies to explore these perspectives. While the full-feature movies generally rely on more traditional camera angles, trailers like this one for Children of Men can explore disorienting light influences, slightly tilted cameras, and other camera angles. Similarly, promotional videos allow marketers to keep their audience’s attention and set themselves apart from their competition through exploring unique perspectives and camera angles.
5) Making the Connection
Finally, both movie trailers and other marketing videos share a common goal. They are not ends in themselves, but seek to point the audience toward something bigger. For a trailer, it’s the feature-length movie; for a brand, it’s turning a viewer into a customer.
That means by necessity, both types of videos have to have a strong call to action. Leading viewers to the audience, or simply telling them to watch for more, can be especially effective in keeping your audience’s attention beyond the length of the video.
In short, marketing video and movie trailers have more in common than you might initially think. Learning from these connection can help you produce better video and promote your brand more effectively.
