Cross media promotion: entertainment industries and the trailer (original) (raw)

Talking Trailers: Promotional materials, and the value of the paratextual turn

Cinephile: The University of British Columbia's Film Journal, 2020

In the last decade, the term ‘paratext’ has become increasingly popular and dominant in studies of promotional materials, applied to study a range of different media forms. Genette’s term appears in Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers (Kernan 2004), before being developed in Show Sold Separately (Gray 2010) and a special issue of Critical Studies in Media Communication (Brookey and Gray 2017). The latter issue states that ‘we know that paratexts walk amongst us’ and that paratextual analysis has advanced ‘a wide and impressive range of academic debates’ (ibid, 101), there has been little discussion about the use value of such a term for the broader work that exists around the production and reception of promotional materials (see, for example, Hesford and Johnston 2015; Johnston 2019). What follows is a discussion between three scholars whose work spans different aspects of promotional materials, to think through the advantages and limitations of the paratextual turn...

Announcement trailers and the inter-temporality of Hollywood blockbusters

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2019

This article examines the blockbuster ‘announcement’ trailer. As teasers-for-the-teaser-trailer, these ephemeral texts invite audiences to look forward to an upcoming film while also calling on them to look back to a previous cinematic encounter. Moreover, their specific reveal-conceal structure also encourages fans to scan the text for clues (to look inward) while making connections to previous texts (to look outward). Building on Jonathan Gray’s concept of ‘speculative consumption’, wherein audiences ‘create an idea of what pleasures any one text will provide’, this article refers to this textual construction and affective sensation as speculative nostalgia, asserting that it is constitutive of today’s blockbuster culture. When situated into the contexts of their industrial and spectatorial temporality, announcement trailers prove to be rich sites for examining blockbusters, not only as intertextual commodities which spread far and wide, but also as inter-temporal commodities in which specific temporal structures are shaped, shared, revised, and felt.

Watching the trailer: Researching the film trailer audience

2016

For over 100 years, the ‘coming attraction’ film trailer has been a key part of film promotion and viewing practices (both theatrical and domestic). Despite the prominent role of the trailer within the fabric of popular media, it has rarely been discussed in terms of audience behaviour, beyond limited claims that the viewer is either misled by inaccurate advertising or has become the source of increased prosumer activity. This article therefore offers the first rigorous exploration of the disparate range of audience perspectives on, and responses to, the trailer. We show that trailer viewing can be understood as a consumption practice that is separate from (and sometimes unrelated to) feature film viewing. Analysing data collected from an online survey, we reveal that while the trailer does have informational and prefigurative value to audiences, trailer viewing is also led by criteria that include emotional attachment, cultural value and social expectation. Our analysis disputes th...

On the concept of the deceptive trailer: Trailer as paratext and multimodal model of film

Sign Systems Studies, 2019

The goal of the article is to contribute to the basic framework of the semiotic study of film trailers, approaching the trailer as a model of film. Discussing the signifying relations between the trailer and the film, I clarify mechanisms through which meta- or paratexts model their source texts and shape their reception. As examples, two cases in which trailers appear to be deceptive about the film’s genre are closely looked upon as the multimodal construction of the trailers of Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s Birdman and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives is analysed. Following Lisa Kernan and Keith Johnston, the film’s genre is seen as the central type of information communicated by the trailer. In this context, genre is understood as dominant in the sense of Roman Jakobson. I propose dominant as the crucial concept: examining incoherences between the dominants of the film and its trailer makes it possible to conduct a closer analysis of the misleading model-making and to predict p...

Fake and fan film trailers as incarnations of audience anticipation and desire

In the lead-up to the release of some feature films, fake and fan trailers are created by users and uploaded to YouTube and other Web sites. These trailers demonstrate that users are literate not only in the form of the trailer itself, but also in the Hollywood system and how it markets products to audiences. Circulating in a networked environment online, these texts, which play with the form of the trailer, perform and embody users' and fans' desire to see not just the feature film but also the official trailer itself. I discuss these fake and fan trailers in relation to cinematic anticipation and describe how they navigate both spatial and temporal bounds. Using the architectural concept of the desire line, I argue that spatial frameworks can be usefully employed to consider how users navigate online spaces, media, and concepts through the form of the trailer.

Think of It as a Trailer… for a Book

Publications, 2016

The seemingly overnight emergence of a form of promotion known as 'book trailers' shortly after the turn of the millennium suggests a shift in the marketing and promotional strategies employed within the publishing industry. This article follows the historical development of the audio-visual form known as the 'book trailer' across its history with a view to understanding the form itself. This article uses third party mediation to identify 'book trailers' within the public domain, grounding this work within a broader media and literary history. As such, this article charts the use of the term 'book trailer' and its competing nomenclature through newspaper archives and contextualises this with antecedent practices, and integrating this with the current literature on the film trailer as part of a wider understanding of the promotional trailer as a cultural entity.