Marc Rosenbush’s Internet Marketing for Filmmakers

How marketing your film online could be the best distribution deal you’ll ever find

by Mallory Potosky | Published October 1, 2008

Only after years spent employed at various other ventures—including stints as a theater director in Chicago and a Web entrepreneur—did Marc Rosenbush finally move to California to pursue his dream of making movies.

By 2006 his first feature, Zen Noir, was complete and ready for release. But, despite numerous festival credits and a healthy following, the movie didn’t receive any distribution offers. So Rosenbush turned to his background in Internet marketing and began self-distributing the film online.

The moviemaker describes himself as coming from a “starving artist’s mentality,” where he was “embarrassed to be too aggressive a marketer.” But Rosenbush realized that “if I spent two years making a film that I care about and I honestly believe will be of value to people, then I’m doing a disservice to myself and the audience by not using any of my power to get it into their hands.” Sound familiar?

Two years after its initial release, Zen Noir is still bringing in money for Rosenbush—with little continued effort on his part. This has allowed him to concentrate on his sophomore directorial effort and his online seminar, Internet Marketing for Filmmakers, a paid course that lays out all the steps needed to find the same distribution success Rosenbush himself has found. In October 2008 he will be speaking at a two-day live event at UCLA. Reviewing the same techniques he touts in his online seminar, Rosenbush will even be inviting members of the audience onstage to help develop personalized marketing plans for their movies.

“I hear from people who get responses at film festivals like, ‘Wow, 10 years ago this would have gone to Sundance in a second.’ Or, ‘Fifteen years ago I would’ve bought this film for my distribution company in a second.’ Now there are hundreds of those kinds of films at festivals.”

The bottom line? If you don’t have a lot of money and need to do it yourself, you can. Here, Rosenbush outlines some of the basic techniques that have helped make Zen Noir an indie success story.

Mallory Potosky (MM): What’s the secret to marketing a product on the Internet?

Marc Rosenbush (MR): If there’s a sales secret, it really comes down to targeted traffic. It comes down to finding people in large numbers predisposed to buying what you’re selling.

MM: How can a moviemaker go about targeting the right audience?

MR: In my experience, the single most effective way to get the correct targeted audience to your site is by forming partnerships with Websites, companies or individuals who have large e-mail lists that are targeted to that particular market.

In the case of my film, Zen Noir, we went after large organizations and Websites that had huge lists of people interested in Buddhism and spirituality and David Lynch movies and anything we thought would be a good match. After a lot of phone calls and a lot of research, we ended up with giant lists of thousands and had many e-mails sent out the same day, endorsing the release of the film.

MM: For somebody who considers him or herself more of an “artist” than a marketer or business person, how would you suggest going about approaching these companies in the first place? What can the moviemaker offer in return?

MR: There’s a whole process that I describe in detail in my course where you can set up joint venture partnerships or affiliate partnerships. You can pay somebody a percentage of the sale or you can do a list exchange where they do an e-mail block for you and you do an e-mail block for them. Or the most sophisticated version, which we did, is where you can actually do a list exchange in conjunction with free gifts. It’s a very complicated system I had run across, one that publishing companies use to get books to the top of the Amazon bestseller list in one day. It involves a whole bunch of joint venture partners working together to get traffic to a site. It’s not a simple system that I can just explain in a few words, but my course gets into all the details.

MM: What do you estimate the cost or time to do this would be?

MR: The money is not the relevant part of it; the time is the much more important thing and the point that I always try to drive home with people is that filmmakers can be very caught up in this idea that, “I made this film. I’m an artist. Somebody else should sell it for me.” If the world were fair, that would be true. If the world were fair, everyone would buy everyone’s film. But the world isn’t fair and what happens is that the making of movies has become democratized.

Anyone can make a movie, but that also means that making films has completely outrun the ability of traditional distributors to distribute them. So where a film 15 or 20 years ago could have gotten into Sundance, now it can’t. Now it can’t even get into some of the second-tier film festivals! Even if it did get into those festivals, it probably wouldn’t get a distribution deal.
The question of “How much time can it take for a filmmaker to do it?” is not the relevant question. To me, it’s “How long did I spend making my film? How much money did I just spend making my film? Am I prepared to have it sit on the shelf gathering dust for the rest of my life?”

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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT

Comment by Raul Gomez on 10/06/08 at 8:11 pm

no comment

Comment by Julian Perrera on 10/07/08 at 5:58 pm

I couldn’t agree more about getting access to your fans’ email addresses. If you do a big push for your current movie and get permission to contact them they will be the first place you go when you have a next movie.

Definitely build a list of people that want to hear from you, give them content to keep them engaged, and they will be there and interested when you have something for sale.

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I agree with you that anyone can make a movie, but that also means that making films has completely outrun the ability of traditional distributors to distribute them.
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Turns out making a film isn’t so tough. On the other hand, getting your film out into the world, replenishing your bank account, paying off your credit cards and making your investors happy is another story entirely (and usually not a comedy with a happy ending).

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