Bunker 15 Films brings a modern tech twist to Indie Publicity

We invited Bunker 15, whom we worked with on the theatrical release of The Light of the Moon, to write a guest blog post for us, explaining who they are and what they did for TLOTM and other films.

Tech Entrepreneur bringing Influencer Marketing to Hollywood

Technology may be making it easier to get a film made and distributed…but how do you get your film to stand out in such a crowded marketplace? Sundance just had a mind-blowing 14,000+ applicants for their festival. Even with a theatrical release, it is difficult to capture the mind-share of viewers and build a critical mass when you have a small marketing budget and no A-list talent. To publicize their films, distribution firms and filmmakers are turning to social media campaigns to get in front of an audience because they are easy to run, relatively cheap and (hopefully) you can target a niche audience. However, in practice, again and again, social media campaigns cost more than the viewership they produce.

There might be other options. Daniel Harlow, a tech entrepreneur and founder of Bunker 15 Films, has a strategy that seems to be working—even for small indie films with limited budgets.

Background

Harlow sold his IT Consulting company (founded right out of UCLA) in 2015. After 23 years of work, 6 offices, and 300 employees, he suddenly nothing to do. He ended up going back to UCLA, this time for their post-graduate Film Studies Program for Independent Producers—mostly for fun. Harlow became fascinated with the technology changes in the entertainment industry. DVD sales had mostly gone away and theaters were primarily for large Special-Effects-driven studio blockbusters. Indies were seen at home through streaming services where piracy cut into revenues even further. “There were no answers at UCLA Film Studies for how to draw audiences to a particular film,” said Harlow. All new technology players in the film space were making their money from the Long Tail theory. Less revenue per film but a massive number of additional films will lead to more revenues overall. The game is volume. Players like Apple, Amazon and Netflix were making money but each individual film was getting a smaller and smaller share of a larger overall pie.

At his former company, Harlow ran several marketing campaigns for clients like Walmart, Nike, Macy’s, Sephora, The Gap and others. “In many situations we had exactly this Long Tail issue: an infinitely large storefront of the internet. How do you make a product stand out? Most times, we used Influencer Marketing campaigns – which are now common for the Makeup, Fashion and other industries,” said Harlow. “I went to SXSW thinking that I could find the thought leadership on this and work on real solutions, but there was no leadership on the subject. The only solution anyone proposed was the Do-It-Yourself model which I thought was only applicable to a small number of filmmakers.”

Do-It-Yourself

The DIY movement in film certainly has a lot of buzz and momentum. The Sundance Institute and other prominent institutions advocate filmmakers marketing their own films. “I had interviewed dozens of filmmakers and I just don’t know if you could possibly find a worse fit than a filmmaker with marketing. They aren’t oriented toward that and they really don’t want to do it,” said Harlow.

The DIY process for PR is fairly simple. Go online and hunt down journalists and critics yourself. Find them or their editors and email them about your film. You are bound to find some interested in watching or writing about your movie which is, by definition, more PR than you had before. And you Did It Yourself. Voila.

For a small minority of filmmakers, it works – if it fits their personality. Some producers are exhausted after the filmmaking process and would love to do something more left-brain like monetizing, marketing and distributing the film. “These types of filmmakers would probably have been involved in the business side of the film no matter what happened,” said Harlow. But it is a small group. The majority of filmmakers are artists, right-brain thinkers, and writers. Monetizing the film is too tedious for them and they probably have a queue of scripts and projects they want to move on to. The majority, once the film is finished, want to do a little press then start working on the next project. Often, these projects take so long to come to fruition that if they don’t move on quickly, it could be years before they have another finished film.

Plus, there are practical obstacles of trying to publicize your own film. Many publications have rules forbidding communicating directly with a film producer. The publication needs to be communicating with a third party to keep the article unbiased. And the sheer difficulty of chasing down critics one by one and asking them to review a film is a daunting task, particularly when coupled with the time-critical nature of the job. Film critics usually want to publish an article within a week of a film’s release. If it’s already been released, it’s ‘old news’ and if it’s not going to be released for 3 months, then don’t bother me yet, they think. That’s a narrow time window to communicate with dozens of journalists.

Thinking Forward

Despite the fact that it would be difficult for an individual filmmaker, Harlow thought that if Influencer Marketing could work in other industries, why not film? After all, film journalism already has a rich and storied history. “There must be a way to leverage the hundreds of entertainment writers out there, at least I hoped so,” said Harlow. But his initial research wasn’t encouraging. Project Lodestar did a study that surveyed 750 entertainment writers worldwide and found an overall downward trend in the coverage of Indie films. Publications had downsized their writing staff and decreased the size of their Entertainment sections, and thus they mostly needed to focus only on the biggest films. Journalists were more restricted than ever to covering only theatrically-run films in their local market.

“SXSW, UCLA and now Project Lodestar all gave off this grim picture for individual filmmakers, but I thought that what they were missing was this burgeoning space of film writers that were taking to the internet to blog on their own. More entertainment publications (especially websites) were decoupling from any given geography. And it was the geographical boundary that tied a publication to theaters in their area. The hard copy nature of old-world, established journals limited physical space available for Indie articles but these limitations also didn’t apply to website and blogs. For example, Roger Moore’s Movie Nation covers a large number of Indie films every month. So why not work with publications like that?” Harlow thought.

After several initial Beta-tests with tiny films that gave Bunker 15 Films encouraging results, it took on a big festival winner: Light of the Moon by Jessica M. Thompson. Light of the Moon was one of their first major efforts to see if the system would work. And did it! 75 Rotten-Tomatoes journalists requested to see a preview screener of the film. As expected, many of them couldn’t get their publications to publish a review about an Amazon Prime release but even some of the larger outfits did cover the film in other ways. The LA Times, for example, made Light of the Moon their VOD Pick of the Week based on Bunker 15’s outreach. The Chicago Tribune interviewed one of the actors for a piece in the paper and several of the writers wrote reviews for their blogs, many of which had huge followings. All in all, Bunker 15 Films secured 17 additional Rotten Tomatoes certified reviews for the film and a number of other pieces like the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, FilmINK in Australia, etc.

What Bunker 15 Does and How it Works

Bunker 15 doesn’t just have a large database of film and entertainment journalists but also it catalogs the films they have written about. There is information on what they have liked and disliked over time. Therefore, they can target the journalists that cover and like small Indie films. Mike Bravo, the company’s CTO, says, “There’s quite a bit of technology in place now to find entertainment bloggers and reach out to them when certain films fit their profile. We are building profiles of both critics and the publications they write for, which is complicated, because one writer might write freelance for one publication doing VOD Streaming movies but might only cover theatrical films for another publication. Plus, writers move around and change publications all the time. We are also trying to build resources for the critics themselves so the critics have an interest in being in contact with Bunker 15,” Bravo says.

“The key for us really is finding that subset of critics that are going to be interested in a particular film and that’s not real easy. Each journalist and publication has geographical and theatrical constraints, genre interests, timing issues… there are a lot of variables but we try to find the journalists that are really into a particular film or genre and focus there,” Harlow says.

The results have been amazing. Turns out that critics really want to watch Indies and like them when they watch them. It’s all about expectations. If it’s a small film, the critic will judge it on its own merit, not by its production value or special effects budget.

Critical reception for many of their films, like Light of the Moon, Stay Human, A Boy Called Sailboat, and others has been overwhelmingly positive. “Not every film we work with has a fantastic reception among the critics but our ability to get to journalists that do like Indies (as opposed to those whose expectations are met only by large Studio efforts) can make a big difference,” says Harlow.

The Future of Bunker 15 Films

“We see ourselves moving into other industries eventually because the same macro-trends that are affecting film are also at work with literature and music. The technologies that allow them to be created and distributed have resulted in an explosion of content for the average consumer to wade through with little except Influencers and reviewers to help choose among everything coming at them each day. But for now, we continue to build out tools and content for entertainment journalists and focus on film,” he says.
“As we move forward, I think the ground will shift in our favor,” say Harlow. The MN Star Tribune now has a Rotten Tomatoes certified movie critic reviewing VOD releases for the week. The LA Times is expanding their coverage of Streaming films and so is the New York Times. In addition, many publications are treating Netflix Originals in the same category as Theatrical releases. Harlow continues, “The trend to cover more and more VOD Streaming releases will increase which will put more journalists within our reach for our Indie films.” If it’s working now, then it’s safe to say it will work better as time goes on.

About Bunker 15 Films

Bunker15’s smart-tech Publicity Engine helps find the right journalists to promote your film (VOD or Theatrical). Even VOD releases can earn Press. Every film deserves to find its audience. Whether you have a small film with a limited theatrical release or you have a Straight-to-VOD feature, they can reach out to the journalists that are interested in your story.

admin April 15th, 2019

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