Internet Banners for Film Advertising

             Still images marketing techniques have long been a major part of advertising for films. Independent films which cannot afford TV spots especially relies on the affordability of post card give aways and poster marketing. In this same tradition internet banner ads are a new means of affordable marketing that can be much more effective and lower cost then still posters or post cards, and at a lower cost. This effectiveness can come from the fact that banner ads not only provide visibility to the film just as posters and post cards do they also provide the potential audience the opportunity to go directly to your films website and see a preview of it.

            Banner ads then allow those interested in to take more then a card with them, one which they will likely forget about soon, and banner ads allow them to see your trailer and interact with your films website as well. Just as importantly banner ads provide the ability to be tracked, so that you can know exactly how your ads are doing, what their click through rates are? This will allow you to know what images potential customers are most drawn to which will provide with much needed information for all your other marketing campaigns.

            There are two ways to pay for a banner ad campaign, pay per thousand (CPM) in which you pay for every thousand times someone sees the ad, or PPC in which you only pay when someone clicks on the ad.

            When starting a CPM banner ad campaign it is important to research the potential demographics of your film, and then run a number of different campaigns targeting each of these demographics. To do this you need to review websites to determine where your target audiences will be located online. It is recommended for a smaller budget of under 1,000 dollars that you pick only a very few websites and market on them exclusively to insure that the same people will see your ad about 4 or 5 times. This will help increase awareness much more then a lot of people seeing the ad only once.

Once you have started the campaign you need to use metrics (statistics) in order to determine which ads are working better and which sites are working better, this way you can drop those sites and ads which are underperforming in order to get the best amount of money for your ad.

In the case of PPC campaign it is possible to be a little more open with you site selection, choosing news and entertainment sites, and general interest sites or social sites such as My Space as well. In this way your ad will reach a wider audience, but you will still only pay for those interested in the ad rather then for every one who sees it. Be forewarned that ad networks that allow PPC campaigns will decrease the number of times an ad shows if it has too low a click through rate. Also PPC ads can be more expensive if you have an intriguing image. If you pay 50 cents per click and get 5 per thousand for example then you will be paying $2.50 per thousand impressions where as on many networks the cost is closer to $1.00 per thousand impressions. It is very important for this reason to track your marketing campaigns success rate to keep costs down and insure that the right people are clicking on your ad.