Efficacy of Movie Trailers in Capturing Viewer Attention and Interest

Today’s postmodern world, ruled by smart phones and social media has experienced a phenomenal growth through digitalisation. Simultaneously, film trailers have gone through a notable transformation becoming one of the major promotional tool for films nowadays. Film trailers entice the audience to go and watch the particular film. Mostly it is made to bring their target audience into theatres which are the people most likely to watch the film. Target audience depends on age, gender, socioeconomic status as well as demographics. Trailers have evolved a lot in recent years becoming a tool that encourages audiences to watch the film, hence bringing in a great deal of money. In order to make people interested in movies, a film begins to advertise it in many ways. However, movie trailers in particular have significant effect on luring the audience into the theatres. The trailers are shown in Television, Internet and even in theatres before screening of other movies. This plays a very big part in bringing in crowd into the theatre than any other advertising technique. The objective of doing this particular research is to analyse the effectiveness of film trailers.

A lot of issues are often associated with trailers nowadays. First is trailers often gives away too much information about the film that eventually spoils the movie going experience. This has actually become a trend in modern cinema where all the important plot points and interesting twists are revealed in the trailer itself. Certain directors take all the best and exciting parts from a movie and compress everything in the 2 minute trailer. Audience will get disappointed when watching the film because there is no more exciting part in the film and all the best parts are already spoiled in the trailer itself. For example, the trailer of Batman Vs. Superman and also Marvel’s Captain America Civil Trailer. Doomsday presence would have been a big surprise to the audience but it was thoroughly spoiled by the unnecessary reveal in the trailer itself. Captain America Civil War trailer on the other end shows Spider-man at the last part of the trailer. Both this trailers spoils most of the exciting action sequences from the movie and also reveals the important plot point in the trailer itself.

A good trailer should excite the audience without giving away too much information about the movie and its plot. A good example of this would be the trailer of The Dark Knight. It teases Heath Ledger’s character as the joker as well as making the movie looks epic. The trailer gives bits and pieces of information and also leaves the audience wanting more. On the other hand, some trailers mislead the audience. Certain trailers have footages that are not in the movie. Although it is not new for a trailer to feature extra bit of a particular footage or maybe a different take of a particular scene, it is unusual for a trailer to sell a scene even after it’s edited out of the movie. For example, the trailer of Avengers Infinity War features a slow-motion shot of the superheroes running and this shot is not even in the movie. Furthermore, mis-marketing of trailer is also another issue with trailers nowadays. Directors fail to realise that not all movies are for everyone. Certain movies are meant for adults, certain movies are for children, certain movies are for teenagers, while certain movies are for family audiences. Unfortunately, trailers are created as if it’s for everyone in order to get a bigger and wider reach as possible. For example, the trailer of Drive was marketed as a “Fast and Furious” type of film but it turned out to be a quiet character study in most of the part. This makes most of the audience feels cheated after watching the movie.

There are not much researches conducted about film trailers. However, Aoyama Gakuin University students conducted a research that is called “A Study on Effectiveness of Movie Trailers Boosting Customers’ Appreciation Desire: A Customer Science Approach Using Statistics and GSR”. This particular research focuses on the film industry in Japan. When a preliminary study is conducted in theatres they found out that 71% of moviegoers watch trailers at the theatre before a feature film and by improving the quality of a trailer the number of theatre customers will increase. They applied customers’ science in order to determine the elements that should be incorporated in movie trailers and also GSR (Galvanic Skin Response) to determine where they should be arranged in the trailer once it is chosen. After running some interviews with movie trailer Production Company, the author then listed the important elements that should be present in a movie trailer. The research targeted people at their early 20’s and they were asked to evaluate those different elements on a 7 point scale as well as providing individual feedbacks. 7 shared common factors received high points such as evaluation, story, picture, maker, function, narration as well as background music. The top 4 groups in terms of interest were then used for the GSR experiment. GSR is a phenomenon whereby the electrical conductance of the skin changes in response to psychological stimulation due to the production of sweat in response to certain psychological states. For this study, GSR was used when subjects were watching a movie trailer to identify the type of scenes that were memorable for the audiences as a result of tension, excitement or other form of psychological stimulation.

The trailers used for the experiment were determined using information collected during the element survey and the following movies were selected from the top three genres in terms of participant preference: 1) “Expendables (action)”, 2) “Insitemiru (suspense)”, and 3) “Eat, Pray, Love (drama)”. It was also revealed that most viewers responded during the beginning and also the end of the movie trailer.

From this particular information, the author of the research deducted that the initiation of an event and also end of an event leaves a lasting impression which causes the beginning and ending of a movie trailer to have the most impact on the viewers. The trailer of The Expendables, which garnered the most response from the viewers, was used to identify why certain parts caused a reaction among the viewers. For example, change in the brightness of the picture, skilful changes in the soundtrack, and also sound effects can impact and capture viewers’ attention meanwhile long action scenes might make the viewer’s fatigue.