There’s an intriguing new player on the market that could help indie films still struggling to recover market traction post-pandemic to gain some additional prominence and exposure. Letterboxd, a New Zealand-based platform where film fans share ‘playlists’, review, and track movies is now being leveraged to provide an extra marketing boost for specialty films with limited marketing traction. Blake & Wang P.A entertainment attorney, Brandon Blake, takes a look.
A Decade in Action
The platform has been around for a little over a decade now, but with 6.5M members, and over half its member base calling North America home, it has begun to attract some solid attention recently. Over 1B films have been ‘logged’ on the platform, with 300M of those reaching their ‘must watch’ lists, and a database of over 76.8M reviews. Interestingly- and importantly- the average visitor logs around 40 minutes on the site, suggesting this is a lot more than just hollow content posting, too.
More importantly to the indie film industry, it allows for some very specific and niche audience targeting. As an example, one of their targeted lists currently is ‘time travel films where the protagonist ends up either having to kill themselves or go right back to the start again, stopping the movie from ever actually happening’
Targeted Advertising Almost Accidentally
This fan-driven ability to create very nuanced and specific targets makes the platform an interesting potential targeted advertising partner for films with very little to spare for broad-level marketing. And the targeting is very different from the standard age, employment, area targets offered by most marketing platforms currently.
Interestingly, Letterboxd was part of the campaign around the black-and-white Parasite theatrical release in 2020. It has since embraced the idea of acting as an indie marketing platform more thoroughly, working with some well-known indie distributors.
To market successfully on a limited budget, indie productions need the ability to grab the interest of the ‘right’ people, who may be broadly scattered across a range of standard demographic and not easily groupable by anything but the niche appeal of their specific topic. Nailing down the interest in an ‘energy’ or ‘vibe’ is a lot harder than merely finding local teens or families. With the social platform’s expansion into working directly with distributors to produce targeted emails and social campaigns, the potential is there to help drive new eyes to smaller productions- including alerting those who’ve added a picture to their watch list that it’s reached specific markets, or gone to streaming.
It’s an interesting model, and one both more accessible and much more structured for smaller productions. With the indie film market still struggling in the theatrical release arena, it’s a model we could see grow considerably as its market influence and traction expand, too. In a world more geared for the big-budget marketing spend tent poles and blockbusters can throw out online, platforms like this could become a strong force in helping indie stars shine. The potential, at least, is very strong, and we hope to see more niche platforms with a similar idea proliferate.