How to Work the Film & TV Markets

19 Know Your Product

The entertainment industry is unique. In the early days until just a few decades ago, studios used to defer determining their promotional and distribution strategies until after each movie was in the can, leaving this critical last leg of the journey to be handed off to a whole new fleet of strangers — from totally different studio departments — brand new to the project. That may have worked fine in an era with very little competition for the big six Hollywood studios or just the big three networks, but with global competition at a fever pitch, flopping Research and Development (R&D) and marketing until after manufacturing makes very little sense in our modern media-savvy world. That legacy method of operation, like so many ...