All Marketing Is Local

The singlemost prevalent and unfixable problem I’ve observed in filmmakers is the lack of a core fanbase. Without a core following, someone (either a producer, marketer, or distributor) is expected to create momentum out of thin air… and that is becoming more and more difficult as marketing moves from synthetic (advertising, junkets, etc) to organic (word-of-mouth, web chatter, etc).

Personally, I don’t like the term “fanbase.” I prefer the simpler term “base.” I also like “core following.” I find those to be more instructive. Today’s media creators can learn a lot from politicians who understand things like kissing babies & shaking hands, galvanizing the base, and “all politics are local.” Political pundits have developed a shorthand for how politicans roll: there’s retail politics and wholesale politics. Retail politics is direct, one-on-one… shakin’ babies and kissin’ hands. Wholesale politics is broad, massmarket… reading a teleprompter on network television. I suppose in the Age of Obama we could probably add a third category: aggregator politics–the use of web-systems to create retail connections on a wholesale level. [I brought up Obama so I guess I should close out that thought: Obama is masterful as a wholesale politician and groundbreaking as an aggregator politician, but not so great as a retail politician. Then why did he crush his opposition? Is retail politics less effective than wholesale & aggregator politics? I don't think so. I think he developed aggregator politics into a science to offset his retail weakness, and he raised enough money to crowd out opposition in the far costlier battleground of wholesale politics. But that's just my humble opinion and I digress.]

There’s a theory that’s been circulating the past few years called A Thousand True Fans… basically if an artist can have 1,000 people who adore her work enough to buy everything she does as soon as she does it, that artist can make a decent living. It works a bit better for say a singer-songwriter than an actress or filmmaker, but that’s not the point. The point is “True Fan.” True Fan does not equal Fan and it does not equal Friend. It’s a very specific type of person… it’s basically a fan who feels they have a personal connection with you, but not so much that they’re actually your friend (because your friends want everything for free). Where does a True Fan come from? I believe a True Fan comes from retail politics.

I’ve Got 99 Problems and being famousish ain’t 1

I occasionally roll with famousish people. It’s a bit more fun than rolling with people who wish they were famous and a lot less fun than rolling with criminals. But most famousish people are nice enough.

A couple months back I was hanging with a famousish actress at a festival. I asked her if she’s psyched that she won the lottery and became famousish really early in life, and her answer was that she was happy about it because she “really learned a lot about people.” Really? Being famousish enables you to really learn a lot about people?

For the rest of the day, I watched her get hounded by fans who interrupted her conversations, asked her questions that had nothing to do with herself or even her public persona but simply about characters she’s played, and aggressively requested (demanded?) she take photos with them so they could grab her around the waist and smear sweat on her shoulder.

I don’t know what those kinds of experiences teach her about people, but if it were me I’d probably learn that most people are a mix of narcissistic dorks and overly-entitled assholes. I would think my fans were to be tolerated rather than appreciated and that they existed for profit not for connection.

So despite it being one-on-one, that’s not what I mean when I say retail politics.

That kind of relationship is the fruit of wholesale politics and massmarketing. It’s a relationship of “star” and “fan.” Massmarketing puts up huge barriers between stars and fans. On its face, the symbiotic relationship of mutual exploitation is fine, but it’s not built to last. The barrier between star and fan is erected by middlemen who profit from the transaction until the relationship inevitably sours. The fans and the middlemen move their attention to another star, and the star has no fanbase to call her own. Bummer for the star.

The key to retail-politics and base-building, in my opinion, is creating a direct, personal connection with your audience.

I’ve had a lot of different experiences marketing/promoting films and events, but there are two that really define the poles for me here.

My experiences in retail politics
After making the guerrilla-indie film Threat with the Kings Mob crew, we piled into a van and drove cross-country to Sundance. We were naive enough to think Sundance was some sort of halfway house for aspiring filmmakers, so it seemed like the place to take our film even though we weren’t actually invited (or welcome). I was 23 at the time and the internet was fairly new but it was already an effective means of organizing. Through hardcore-punk messageboards and the mailing list we’d developed during production, we turned our trip to Sundance into a little mini-tour. On the Atari Teenage Riot messageboard, we found a dude in Pittsburgh who offered to screen the movie in his apartment and let us sleep on his floor. Not only was the apartment packed full of awesome people when we got there, but he became one of my very close friends and ten years later he flew to LA for my wedding (I also eventually convinced him to make a vegan cooking DVD we put out). It’s weird to describe a relationship like that as retail politics or marketing, but it’s an instructive example of how marketing can result in real personal connections. On the way to Sundance, we met some of the most amazing, coolest people I’d ever met in my life, slept on their floors, ate the food they cooked for us, and played our movie for them and their friends and whoever else showed up. The audiences ranged from 10-300, which isn’t all that different from a lot of movie theater showings I’ve had over the years, except for the insightful conversations and personal connections that followed. I remember one night we played the movie in a bar in Iowa City and someone who really wanted to see it missed the show, so we went to her apartment that night and played it for a packed room (many of whom had seen it earlier in the night and wanted to watch it again) while we ate the bean burritos she cooked us and slept on her floor. This all probably sounds very small and unprofitable, but it is neither. Not only were these great times and great people, but the shows were more consistently profitable than a lot of things we do on a massmarket level these days, and without those relatively small pieces coming together I would’ve never had the base that’s enabled me to function on a massmarket level. If anything, I regret not being able to do more of those types of events today. Anyhow, we eventually made our way to Sundance where, of course, nobody gave a shit about us. None of the suits trying to get on the guestlist for the coolest coke parties wanted to see our movie. And if we hadn’t built our base along the way, we would’ve been fucked. BUT on the way to Sundance we’d learned that we didn’t need the suits to reach our audience. So we walked into a Doc Marten’s shoe store across the street from Sundance’s flagship Egyptian Theater and talked to the clerks, who later convinced their bosses to let us show the movie there. Then we went to WalMart and talked to the skater girl working in the electronics section about WalMart’s 30-Days No Questions Asked return policy. We outfitted the shoe store with as many TVs as we could put on our credit cards (all to be returned shortly thereafter) and promoted our shows to hardcore kids, skaters, snowboarders, and various young ne’er-do-wells in the greater Salt Lake City area. We wound up with lines around the block, all four showings sold out, and a 4-page feature cover story in London’s Daily Telegraph Saturday Magazine, which we later parlayed into a European tour. That was neither small nor unprofitable.

My experiences in wholesale politics
When I was turning 30, I’d been through the wringer a few times and was broke and working graveyard shifts in a print shop in Central LA. One night at around 4am, I was arguing with my supervisor about something ridiculous and realized I needed to get the fuck out of there before I wound up losing my temper and doing something stupid (as I’m apt to do). So I went out in the parking lot, sat on the tailgate of my pickup truck, drank cold coffee and decided to dig up Threat, stitch it into some sort of Frankenstein and raise it from the dead so I could get out of my job. The question was how to do that with a strange little movie that never got much interest from the industry and whose core audience seemed to be hardcore punk kids, anarcho-squatters, radical protesters, and black women (what? I have no idea, that’s just how Threat rolls). To solve that problem, I considered a few of the cultural shifts that’d occurred since Threat had its life cycle as an underground weirdo movie: DVDs became huge, hardcore-punk and its metalcore derivations became popular, and “mashups” became stylish. So… I decided to make a Threat soundtrack album of hardcore bands being mashed up by electronica DJs, take that to one of the major studios that distributes indie labels, tell them it’s a modern day “Judgment Night” soundtrack, and convince them to give me a bunch of money for my new DVD/CD movie & soundtrack label. And basically that’s what I did. I got a bunch of money from Sony and I was so sick of retail politics that all I wanted to do was spend someone else’s money and market the film to people who buy stuff (astonishingly enough, anarcho-squatters don’t buy a lot of DVDs) so I could pay off my debts to society for years of indie rabblerousing. All of this led to some questionable marketing decisions where Frankenstein-Threat was retrofitted for American malls. Nearly ten years after it took its first breath of life as a gritty little bastard of a film that played bars, basements, and anarchist bookstores, Threat was essentially dolled up in a spiked collar & mascara’d eyes as a “New Release” at FYE, Tower, and Hot Topic sandwiched in between Thirteen and Underworld with full page ads in Revolver and Alternative Press and commercials running on MTV2 and Fuse. The result? Meh. It sold ok, but at such astronomical marketing cost that it wasn’t worth the effort. Plus it made its money by selling to people it wasn’t suited for, so the initial audience and critic response was lousy and that did more harm than good. I’d basically gone out of my way to make all the newbie mistakes of chasing massmarket will-o-wisps that we’d been savvy enough to avoid the first time around. So, kicking myself for being an idiot, I went back out on the road and started the retail politics of Threat over again from scratch, playing it in small venues, hanging with the audience afterward to discuss the film, seeking out critics with the appropriate tastes to understand the film and champion it, shakin’ babies and kissin’ hands. I managed to salvage it again (or maybe it managed to salvage me again), and it finally settled into the kind of respected-by-weirdos movie it was intended to be. And it got me out of the print shop, so I guess the ridiculous scheme worked at the end of the day.

Here’s the lesson I took from all this:
Threat wasn’t sustainable as a solely retail-politics style release, but it wasn’t launchable as a solely wholesale-politics style release. It needed both. AS DOES EVERYTHING. Your boat needs both a paddle and a sail, otherwise you’ll either never get out to sea in the first place or you’ll exhaust yourself once you get there.

You’re not making movies or music or webisodes or whatever it is you think you’re making, you’re making personal connections with other people. A film is a personal connection between the filmmakers and the film watchers. If you ignore that connection, the product itself has no value.

Making a personal connection with members of your audience can take many forms. It can consist of sleeping on their floors, facebook-friending them, or meeting them in public and taking a picture with them. However, it doesn’t mean getting a spambot to autofriend them or holding your nose in the photo. That’s why I prefer the example of sleeping on their floor… you can’t get a bot to sleep on someone’s floor for you. I’ll get into aggregator-politics in a future post (and hopefully a more concise, focused one at that), but do not make the mistake of confusing retail-politics with aggregator-politics. They’re two different things, even though they can be done using similar tools.

Your job is to cultivate a core following that cares about your message and what you do, and will support you with cash-purchases and positive word of mouth as you create your body of work. That process cannot be outsourced to spambots and massmarket advertising, it can only be done one personal connection at a time. Only once you’ve built that support network can you potentially benefit from the wholesale-politicking of massmarket distribution.