Film Courage: I'm wondering if you could just define for me Prints and Advertising (P&A)
just so I can fully understand? Houston Howard, Author/Instructor: Sure. P&A (Prints and Advertising) is
the way to build awareness. It's basically the marketing for a film it's
people don't use prints as much anymore the prints is being changed to more
digital stuff so so the a and P and a is I think the the the large case a the
upper case a and the small P but it is how a distributor builds awareness for
the film and make sure the film everybody knows about the film and and
so that's great because because in an oversaturated world you need to be able
to let people know that you exist I mean today access access to people isn't an
issue it's not that's no longer a problem because of the internet I can
shoot a movie I can put on YouTube I can put on Vimeo I can put it up on the
Internet in a hundred different ways and instantly I'm in 3 billion people's
pockets around the world so now like access to people is not an
issue ever ever again more likely like that's not a problem
the problem is how do if I if my movies in your pocket or in your purse how do
you know it's there and so that that's really the biggest issue right now and
so they think well all we can do is make sure we pump up our PA to have these
exorbitant P&A budgets and that's the way to let people know that they're
there but in an era where people hate advertising people hate marketing we we
invent technology just to skip ads and I'm not I'm sure I'm not the only one
that putting on watching a YouTube video and I'm there's an ad on before the
video I'm just staring at the bottom right hand corner ready to click as soon
as it zero right like we're trained to avoid advertising and so that then when
everybody's trying to avoid advertising the studio's say well we'll just do more
advertising will do more advertising will do more advertising and is
oversaturate oversaturate say you can't escape it but then people will always
try to escape it my my perspective is how do you engage them in different
ways and let's let's let's take the the the purpose of PA which is building
awareness building pre awareness making sure that there's a there's an audience
that is built to to show up on an opening day or the first two weekends
how do we how do we accomplish that through a more effective way because
it's not always about just throwing money after money after money after
money in some of these ineffective ways it's about how do we think a little bit
differently and engage the marketplace and a different way and what we know now
is people love story people love entertainment people love characters we
live in an entertainment society you know everybody always talks about the
diminished attention span of people today because there's so many options
you know ever heard someone to say recently that people have a have lower
attention attention spans lower than a goldfish right like you know cuz we're
there's so much stuff and that and that's why people don't want to watch
advertising because we just we get distracted too easily I don't
necessarily believe that because they get what they're saying but the same
people that they say have attention spans lower than that of a goldfish
they'll binge watch 10 hours of house of cards on that one of the weekend that
it's released and so they can zero in and watch house of cards for 10 hours on
their couch focused engaged they'll sit there and binge watch you know 13
reasons why they'll they'll rip through six seasons of Game of Thrones in a
month because of course you would I'll watch all seven Star Wars movies back to
back to back to back to back to back to back back up until episode 8 is released
in giant marathon we can focus we can engage an ant but we can now choose what
we focus and engage in - and so all we have to do is provide other mechanisms
for people to engage and if you can provide other mechanisms that are
engaging then all of a sudden we can accomplish the the purpose of PA but in
a way that is more valuable for the audience and even a way that can that
can even drive additional revenue so that that's
what I'm that fascinates me about this model is how how we can attack how can
we attack the whole problem that's surrounding independent filmmaking and
and storytelling in general how are we just going to attack it in a different
way that's more rewarding for fans and more rewarding for filmmakers
you