It's not easy being number two. As a marketer, you have limited choices - you can pretend you're not defined by the market leader, or, you can embrace your position and go directly after your nemesis.
I used to be able to pitch them on the basis of the zombie action, and I could hide the message inside that. Now, you can't. The moment you mention the word 'zombie,' it's got to be, 'Hey, Brad Pitt paid $400 million to do that.'
I've had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, 'Your music sucks, you don't know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don't know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.'
I recall us selling out L.A.'s 5,000-capacity Gibson Amphitheatre and flying straight to Germany to play a 300-capacity room where we'd only sold 120 tickets. This was when 'City Of Evil' was really taking off in the U.S., but it seemed like Europe was less interested.
I really do like the independent way of working. You don't get much studio intrusion compared to when you're working on a big Hollywood film where there tends to always be loads of people interfering. The only problem, though, with independent features is that they are hard to sell.
People may have said, "The dude's gay; how are we going to market this?" But it's not an issue for me, because being out is very freeing.
The marketing department is really an important part of getting an animated film to work. If the people running it are used to selling live action films and the hard rock music and the sex and all those things... Anything outside that, they just don't know what to do with it.
I didn't have any role models of artists that were in the same playing field as me - making expensive videos, travelling, marketing and promoting an album.
It's pretty difficult to promote something the week after Christmas and the week before New Year's.
Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of confusion, throw-aways, bent noses, irritation and downright cursedness.
Being branded to some subset of your fans is important when it comes to creating films and characters they're not familiar with. It's enormously difficult to market to a global audience, and it's becoming more difficult. A brand matters to parents, whereas kids are largely driven by their urgent reaction to the product. In the future, where there are going to be choices that have to be made by parents because it will be prohibitively expensive to access everything, those will be driven partially by brand.
I've been told my movies are difficult to market.
Unfortunately the necessity to promote a film sometimes works against it, in that you are forced to reveal information [about it] that in an ideal world you would hold back.
It's like the query letter problem that I just mentioned, magnified a hundredfold. You might be good at telling a story, but that doesn't mean you know anything about marketing. Or layout. Or editing. Or publicity. Or selling your books for foreign markets.Everyone can point to a few examples of people that have done very well for themselves self-publishing. But honestly, those folks are lucky as lottery winners.
It's hard to market a movie when you're at the mercy of critics and journalists.
Remakes, in general, are a result of necessity being the mother of invention. They can't open movies consistently and break through the advertising clutter that's out there.
Today I find it's extremely hard to launch one's brand, and that's also why we are helping these young talents.
My genre-hopping has caused problems with marketing and sales departments over the years, because they need to know where to position a book with the booksellers.
They said I was a married mother of two but the record sounded like an indie album and they didn't know how to market it! This country is incredibly sexist, as is the music and media industry.
When a record company looks at me I'm very hard to market, I don't really fit anywhere, It's hard to get me on the air, and I'm hard to demography, but! because of that I'm not subject to trends like you pointed out.
Everyone knows how hard it can be to market to millennials.
Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But... the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this - that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure.
Since I'm a mother and a wife, I have to have passion or the frustration would win out. But I love managing people. The product is second to managing the people. And marketing to consumers is so challenging because it is evolving constantly.
If I were not a black artist but I was still singing, playing guitar, and singing ballads that are spiritual and cerebral, I'd be easier to market because people accept that from white female singer-songwriters faster.
When color TV arrived, it just sat there and you saw color. I've been to retail stores where there were no 3-D glasses at all and the 3-D images were all blurred. People were coming in and saying, 'I don't want to buy that.' There's a lot of marketing connected to introducing technologies and especially introducing new experiences.
