Successful Poster Campaigns

With so much riding on a film’s success, marketing one is a massive opportunity for creative designers. Posters are one of the main (and most traditional) means of marketing a film. However, to be truly successful the poster must follow some simple guidelines:

• Film posters need to iconic and attention grabbing. That way they draw audiences in by using main characters or major plot points on the posters.
• It is also important to make sure that you do not give too much away in the poster, only giving the audience a glimpse at what the film is about without letting the know everything.
• The poster needs to make the sudience interested and to have a desire to see the film. This can be done by having an image that makes the viewer feel as if they are there and that they need to see the film in order to resolve the problem.
• The poster needs to be consistant with the film itself. By having a poster with dark colours, tones and blood everywhere when it's promoting a children's animation is a very poor marketing campaign as it will only scare children off instead of drawing them in.
• For film posters to work for the long-term, they need to be scalable, clear, and have  lasting design appeal.
• They MUST be recognizable. That way people will be able to spot it and immediately know what it is promoting. As well as this, it means that if a sequel was to be created, then by keeping the design similar the 2 posters can be related.

One marketing campaign that I have come across is one for the film District 9. It was very different to other campaigns I've seen, using very clear references to our history, regarding race-based rights restrictions.

Below is the generic film poster for the movie.

It contains; the director, the date of release, movie title, etc, just like the majority of film posters around. However the marketing team created a different way to advertise the film that really stuck with me. The marketing team used signs-like posters in order to capture the audiences attention.


By using images that were easily related to those signs around our own towns/cities it could make peoples' heads turn to see what the "signs" were warning them about.


The marketing campaign released 3 different types of posters for the film, all of which could easily pass as billboard images, etc. They are shown below.

Bus Stop Poster

Bench Poster

Billboard Poster

All 3 posters say pretty much the same thing, just in a slightly different format. To anyone viewing them, they would initially be nothing more than a warning. Unlike the conventional movie posters about, they give very little away about the film, what its name is, who's in it, etc. The only ting people can relate it to "District 9" with, is the silhouette of the alien and the website (D-9.com) which is a constant featured on all 3 posters.

It grabs people's attention as it talks about discrimination, an on-going matter in the world, about a race unlike ourselves. The only way people can find out about the information on the signs is with the website and the telephone number which leads the caller to a hotline about non-humans escaping district 9 and could be violent and unpredictable.

This is an excellent way of keeping the overall suspense of the film and what it's entirely about. The phone call also leads the caller to the D-9.com website, a place where the trailer was likely to have been.