1 Week, 8 Titles, 6 Languages, 0 Budget... GO!

Over my years working in the film industry there was not a week that went by that I didn’t hear speculative film moguls tout their projects as the “Best” or the “Only”; whether established Producers touting the exemplary merits of their latest film, exhaustively negotiating to squeeze out every last remnant of profit from the Distributor; to the newcomer’s deeply passionate to tell stories that matter to them; or just those flush with cash or contacts seduced by its perceived hedonistic benefits; We saw it all!  Film has an unmistakable allure that effects people in extraordinary ways beyond their otherwise normal character.  Film gets a hall-pass on that trip to Las Vegas and I suppose we all know by now that what happens in Vegas, well… stays in Vegas.   Film punches far above and beyond its own weight and therein lies its purpose.  Beyond the money, it promises a lifestyle that others dream of, look up to and admire.  Cinema levels the playing field to where even a King might revere his Court Jester.

But what is a film? What is it really? Is it a story? Is it art? Is it an educator? Is it a charitable donation in support of the Arts? 

Many times, the excitement of sharing an idea or a story overwhelms even the brightest of souls who can lose sight of the ground reality that the film industry is in fact an Industry and not a charitable enterprise.  All the core production fundamentals have to be addressed, costs have to be planned, justifiable and managed; and critically of course your audiences have to know about why they need to watch it on the “Big Screen”.  If a theatrical release is your projections.  

As a business head and marketer who focused on theatrical releases over a large section of my career, I’ve learned that it all boils down to answering these very simple questions.   We cannot afford to leave prospective audiences with any doubt at all as to the details that can positively influence their buying decision.  There are many eloquently written articles outlining the various steps and the communications channels we use, so I’ll spare you the repetition.  Just know that we only have what amounts to a three-day window of opportunity to rake in as many admissions as possible before our profitability takes a spectacular nosedive like a drone crashing into the fiery depths of an Icelandic volcano.  So… focus all your efforts to best serve the three-day window, as you will need all available troops fed and rested for that battle.    

Before I threw my hat in the Film Industry ring as my beautiful and at that time new wife and I, began establishing ourselves and our then careers during the early days of Dubai’s fledgling business networking society.  As we skipped from one event to another, building our career foundations and absorbing as much information as possible, I quickly learned the allure of Cinema.  It did not matter what deal anyone had done, its value, or dare I say the positive impact that it would have on the economy or even mankind, none of it mattered; if even the slightest whiff of my wife’s film and cinema background arose, all other subjects would fade away and melt slowly into the effervescent hum of our surroundings, like a single ice cube clinking hypnotically and melting into a glass of champagne in the warm hands of an avid listener, keen to offer up their opinion as a leading authority on the subject at the very first sign of an opportunity.  

This was when I first understood the immense fascination people had with Film; their fundamental relationship with it. It held their hand and became a trusted friend and companion in their formative years.  It took them to places they could only dream about.  It sparked their curiosity and gave rise to many of their future hobbies and careers.  It educated them.  It gave them a holiday album full of fond memories of time shared with family and friends over the years all unwittingly time-stamped and categorized by age, year and relationships.  This was when I first began to understand the various triggers that excited different people about Cinema and why.   The task became clear to interpret them; that spark deep behind their eyes, invisible but unmistakable, emanating from an electrical tsunami, forming in the deepest oceans of their imagination; jaws often agape with fascination over what, at that time, I did not fully understand myself.  

Growing up, cinema was not a particularly big feature for me.  The thought of sitting down and watching something for two hours or more was exhausting.  I couldn’t understand it.  I needed to keep myself occupied at all times.  Drawing, Poetry, Exploring, Tinkering, Exercise and Sports, an extraordinary amount of sports… anything but sitting down without a purpose.  I was much too happy riding my own imagination to be able to concentrate on someone else’s damned imagination for any reasonable length of time.

So, you’d think that my relative distance from Cinema growing up wouldn’t be an ideal starting point for what later became a career in Film and Cinema.  I wouldn’t argue with that.  Many might say I fell into it by default; some might say I fell into it by destiny.  I don’t see it as either.  I fell into it because I had an idea.  I had the idea to decode the ‘spark’ I saw behind people’s eyes and use it to the best of my abilities to generate excitement and energy into what was at that time a ‘Function-only’ Gulf Industry, dominated by a few companies with a suffocating choke-hold on anyone offering to breathe excitement or hope into it.  It became a passion project for me and a challenge I felt compelled to accept.

It was a time with invitation-only Premieres for a very limited handful of titles, when Private industry planned their own haphazard promotions with no thought on whether it would promote the titles and tether itself to any wider communications mix.  There was no locally generated industry content creation, no competitions, no planned communications, no financial support, limited accessibility to industry touchpoints and an almost uncomfortable obsession with newspapers and standees as the only Marketing tools worthy of any budget.  A protective, reactive and dare I say, lazy marketing system instead of the pro-active and inclusive systems prevalent today.  Radio stations were largely uncooperative and did not differentiate between the value of Film and Cinema news to their audiences and the FMCG, automobile, banking, airline and later real estate industries that propped up their financials with annual budgets.  

It was a long and pitfall ridden journey that we in our region embarked on years before social media supercharged the film communications landscape and forced the region’s industry to roll out of bed, make an effort to look presentable and catch up with the rest of the developed world.  

The top powerbrokers of the Gulf industry fought tooth and nail against the rising tides of change.  But people wanted celebrity; people were hungry for it and hungry people wanted to eat…now.  The world was getting smaller year after year and the dams that held back the surging waters of change were inevitably going to blow.  A newer, more vibrant, colorful and better equipped army of filmgoers in the region were going to burst through and demand more from the local industry players.  There was just one problem.  It was virtually impossible to convince any celebrity of consequence to come out here and give us leverage to push the often times resistant media for greater support.  So, the system tethered itself to the more readily accessible Bollywood Industry and to a lesser extent the Malayalam and Tamil industries until the arrival of Dubai’s very own Film Festival.

Throughout its lifespan, the Dubai International Film Festival sought to bring the eyes of the world onto Dubai and the UAE.  It accomplished many of the goals it set out to achieve and it will be cherished by many in our local Industry for some of its largely overlooked and under-reported accomplishments. 

It gave the region’s cinema audiences an opportunity to reach out and touch an Industry that had until then been beyond reach for them; an opportunity to bridge cultures and meet minds.  A gifted and talented team of professionals, unified by the dual missions of establishing Dubai as a major international creative hub and promoting the region's indigenous culture, set out on a journey of discovery fueled by their passion for Cinema.  I might even laud it as a prequel to Dubai’s very own Mars Mission in a way.  It was DIFF that changed me too, offering me the opportunity and their support to use their platform and apply my own vision. 

We needed an ecosystem.  We needed leverage.  We needed content and lots of it!  We would need photographers, videographers, editors, writers, graphic artists, animators, Influencers, researchers, producers, interviewers, segment hosts and MCs all trained and all on the same page, ready to deliver an overflow of high-quality content.  We would also figure out how to do a simultaneous 15 Camera live Internet broadcast with simultaneous Satellite Uplink and downlink for the World Premiere of ‘Mission Impossible 4 – Ghost Protocol’, among many other challenges which until then had not been done before, let alone in the Middle East.  Ummm… No pressure at all then…  

But thanks to tireless efforts of everyone in our fledgling team and with the amazing support from DIFF, TECOM and Dubai Media Incorporated and with help from our Digitally savvy friends at Xische & Co, we managed to pull off a flawless, though exceptionally stressful, performance.  Over the course of our first event, we gathered Terabytes of readily accessible high quality raw and packaged photo and video content which we distributed via our central distribution terminals and in real-time to news outlets locally and throughout the Middle East and further afield, as well as to DIFF and TECOM for dissemination through their own Communications platforms.  

Once our first DIFF was tucked away firmly under our belt, we looked at how we could disrupt the system and make it work for everybody, us included.  

We saw that prior to their release there were a number of small Industry screenings for cinema operators and distributors only.  A handful of people sitting down to watch a movie in two hundred plus capacity screens, more or less.  We wanted to get the press involved so they could talk about the movie and generate an interest.  One by one the region’s leading distributors fell in line willingly and offered up a continuous flow of smaller premiere screenings that we used as leverage to pull in Print media competition winners, Television competition winners, Radio competition winners, Cinema competition winners, bloggers and influencers, and other media and industry personalities from the local markets.  As a service, we photographed and created video content and soundbites for dissemination and distribution via all the traditional and non-traditional media channels which we provided to all the distributors as a function of our core promise.

Over the years, we provided this service to thousands of titles from all different language categories, developing early and targeted databases for each of the segments.  We planned, supported and coordinated hundreds of Premieres, Press Conferences and other Press, Industry and consumer Events for both the Public and Private sectors.   We supported and promoted every distributor and Cinema operator in every language category and though it has evolved substantially since those early days, these functions are now entirely coordinated by the individual distributors, the communications ecosystem that we designed, sponsored and developed is today embedded in the regional film marketing bedrock and fostered in a new era of previously unthinkable barter-based cross-media collaboration.

As marketers we applaud ourselves daily for our accomplishments.  Oftentimes documenting our journey to prove our worth under the scrutiny of “Corporate”.  Proving the tangible success of any campaign is always going to be a challenge, especially when in the feverish hands of those “tight-fisted squirrels in finance whose only goal is to store the hard-earned nuts we fought so hard for”.  Am I right?  So now imagine, having to do all of this with no budget.  Unthinkable? Impossible?

This was the challenge we faced as we marketed anywhere from four to eight of our own and partner titles a week from all different language categories, most of which had no marketing budget at all.  We could not afford the system, so we had to bend the system and adapt it to us.  We had to make sure we could compete effectively against big studio budgets and pull in turnovers for our titles to counter rising procurement costs, a rapidly expanding pool of competitive titles in multiple key language segments and a flood of new and alternative low cost entertainment and hospitality offerings erupting across our markets; further segmenting them and limiting our 3 day window of opportunity yet further.

So, as we go full circle you might still be wondering what the idea was that led me down this path in the first place?  The answer is simple… It was to give everyone at those events, so long ago who believed the GCC Film and Cinema Industry could shine an equal voice to speak through us and reap the benefits of an affordable and snowballing platform through which to amplify it.

So…  if I gave you 1 week, 8 titles, 6 languages and $0 Marketing budget… what would you do?