BAFTA Film Awards and the Key Art of ‘Accolade’ Trailers
“Praiseworthy” takes on a whole new meaning if you look behind the winners and losers at last night’s BAFTAs, and their ferociously hard-fought marketing campaigns.
A friend in publishing was discussing at the weekend the importance of a book jacket review nailing the perfect enticing note in as few words as possible. In this case they had hit the jackpot with Toby Litt describing debutant Isobel Wohl’s Cold New Climate as “a miracle in book form”.
For the last three months BAFTA voters have been in the eye of a marketing storm, as film producers and distributors, through pages of print ads in Screen International, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, plus trailers and invites to screenings, have all tried to shift the dial of positive opinion towards their titles. Reviews are often central to these ads, and the more august the title, and the pithier the praise the better. A perfect combination perhaps would be “Masterpiece” and “New York Times” for example. When we worked with Netflix on the launch of The Crown, their awards campaign trailer that we produced, had the brilliantly concise “It rules” from the Hollywood Reporter itself.
Allied to this are the laurels that can be used to garland both print and video executions. The trailer that jurors were directed to for Best Picture winner Nomadland, opens with three garlands for Best Director, Best Picture and People’s Choice, from Toronto and Venice Film Festival, underlying the ongoing importance of the festivals in the film marketing calendar.
The changes to voting this year at the BAFTAs meant that far more films were viewed than ever before by jurors, and every title in the final shortlists had to be seen before voting. But the order in which they are viewed, and the mood a juror chooses to watch them in — is it a ‘Friday night treat’ or a ‘Sunday morning duty’? — can all be subtly influenced by marketing. Rocks was hands down Red Bee Creative’s film of the year as rewarded in our end of year entertainment picks, but did it suffer from an autumn release date which meant the glow of viewing had faded somewhat by a mid-April vote. Or was the fact we could actually see it in the cinemas in that brief glow of openness, a head start over pictures that could only be viewed as streaming links in front rooms?
In the end the award winners were gloriously diverse and perhaps less predictable than critics and bookies alike believed, and the final influences on where to place a vote will always be equally diverse and unpredictable. What is certain is that in the final sprint towards Oscar voting, trailers will be being frantically recut to include in them the accolade: “BAFTA Winner”.
