Paranormal Activity Case Study

If you haven't heard of Paranormal Activity - the $15,000 movie that went on to make over $100 million - you must have spent the past year under a rock. This is a movie that did so much right in engaging an audience with a teaser campaign to build hype prior to release. There's a lot that other indie filmmakers can learn from them.

A fantastic case study has already been done by Martin Walsh, who wrote:

"I want to highlight this film for three reasons:

1. The size of the budget isn't necessarily a panacea for our problems - at the end of the day you still need a good, entertaining story that's told well.

2. They got the marketing right - knew their audience, embraced digital & traditional marketing

3. They turned the film & artform into an experience.

Paranormal Activity didn’t just promote itself on the cheap; it promoted itself in an intelligent way to the right audiences and through the right channels with the right messages. It's a campaign which was also authentic in the sense that Paramount didn’t try and make out that the film was some slick $30m Hollywood film, it is what it is.

By using existing social media options in combination with some traditional media to inspire and energise the conversations and ultimately to publicize the film, it has achieved substantially better per dollar ROI by giving fans a sense of ownership and a place to share their enthusiasm.

The filmmakers and marketers have facilitated the ability of fans to truly embrace the film and its success or failure as their own and have given them a sense of engagement and participation which is crucial in today’s digital and participatory era."

Martin's full article The Future of Filmmaking: Seizing back control of the Six Pillars is well worth the read, and covers several interlinked topics:

- Failures of the Australian film industry
- Paranormal Activity in detail (begins one fifth the way down the page)
- Ted Hope on the "Six Pillars" of the future film industry (from half way down the page)