Star Wars, Trailers, etc.

Last night, I went to see the new Star Wars movie. It was amazing, and I 100% recommend it to anyone. We had gotten tickets for the 7:30 showing, so we got there at 6:45 so we could get good seats. When we finally got into the theater, there was another 45 minutes before the movie actually started. They were showing advertisements to other movies and companies. This was annoying, but smart of the movie theater to do. What was smart was how they were selling trailers of other movies, and all of the movies were similar to the one we were about to watch. They were all similar movies and geared towards the target audience, which was everyone in the theater at the time. And everyone had to watch them because they had said the movie started a 45 minutes before it actually did. It got the word out of movies that everyone who watched Star Wars would want to see. While this marketing technique has been going on for a while, I found it extremely prevalent when they showed movie trailers for almost an hour.

I don’t think this was to appeal to a specific need or used an advertising technique. But they used the reasoning that everyone who went to the same movie, has similar movie tastes. If you think about it, people who go to watch a kids’ movie aren’t going to have the desire to see a horror movie after they see a horror movie trailer. What they do is fill the trailers with movies the target audience would like to see. I, did see some movie trailers for movies I had never heard of and had a desire to see them, so I guess it worked on me. It was irritating when the theater kept showing one trailer after another, they got old fast. We had come to see a specific movie, not clips from other ones.