[0:00]Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to Black Panther, which is a film text that could appear from 2021 onwards in the EduCast A-Level media exam exam, Component One, Section B, in the Industries questions only.
[0:20]If you are sitting the A-Level exam in 2020, Black Panther will not be on the paper, and instead you could be asked about straight out of Compton.
[0:28]So please only watch and take information for this video for the exam if you are sitting it from 2021 onwards.
[0:34]For the film industry questions, you need to have lots of factual information about the companies that were involved.
[0:40]Black Panther was made by Marvel Studios. Marvel Studios is quite famous for working within a huge number of Marvel Comic related films.
[0:53]And this is the 17th film within this particular franchise of superhero movies.
[0:58]It's part of a shared universe along with several other superhero movies as well that you may have seen.
[1:06]Marvel Studios is a subsidiary company of Walt Disney Studios, and Walt Disney Studios is one of the largest conglomerates in the world.
[1:17]And it owns a huge number of other companies.
[1:20]Marvel is obviously vertically and horizontally integrated, they can do their own distribution and marketing in-house, huge number of facilities, resources and money, which are obviously going to be very important.
[1:33]With Marvel Studios being part of the Walt Disney conglomerate, it means that they were able to use Disney to distribute their film.
[1:41]So this is a good example of a company taking advantage of the fact that they are vertically integrated into a bigger company with more resources.
[1:49]Having Disney as your distributor also means, of course, that you get their big budgets, their experience, their teams, and the fact that they are global means that it's much easier to distribute your product globally as well.
[2:00]And Black Panther certainly was distributed all over the world to a number of countries.
[2:07]Disney have this idea of something called a 360-degree marketing campaign, and that's the idea that in no matter what direction you turn, you should be confronted with images of their movies.
[2:20]So Black Panther was everywhere when it was on the run-up to being released.
[2:25]They released a huge number of marketing materials. They had posters, they had trailers, they had social media pages, they released merchandise, they had the actors going on chat shows and appearing in magazines, and they worked with a whole range of companies to produce synergetic products that were relating to the films so that hopefully audiences across the world would encounter the branding of Black Panther and the ideas of the film and the characters wherever they went, raising awareness of the film, and hopefully resulting in an increased profit.
[2:57]Disney worked with Hasbro, which is a very famous toy company.
[3:02]They released a range of action figures and other toys tied to the film, and these synergetic products or merchandise are a great way of engaging a number of audiences.
[3:13]So for example, it might engage young children, family-friendly toys are going to appeal to those family audiences, and this was marketed as quite a family-friendly film.
[3:22]Also, quite engaging to real fans of those comic book universes, the shared Marvel Universe that Black Panther is part of, they often like those kind of collectible action figures that are part of that Hasbro range.
[3:36]Disney also worked in conjunction with Lexus, a car manufacturer.
[3:41]Lexus released two limited edition cars that were tied to the Black Panther campaign, and therefore every time the cars were marketed, the film ended up getting marketed too.
[3:49]And this is a great way of targeting male, slightly older audiences, interested in technology, who might also be the target demographic for Black Panther.
[4:00]Kendrick Lamar was asked to release a soundtrack for the film in conjunction with Marvel and Disney, and Kendrick Lamar has quite a young, black, urban male target audience.
[4:12]So it's a good way of targeting that pre-sold fan base and bringing them on board to the film as well.
[4:17]Trailers are obviously a very traditional way of marketing films, and Black Panther had several trailers that it released both on television, in the cinemas, and also online as well.
[4:33]And the trailers, like most trailers, were edited to show the best parts, the most exciting parts of the film, to show off the actors and some of the special effects, and they made it really clear in the trailers that Black Panther was part of that shared Marvel Universe to appeal to those pre-sold fans of the other related movies.
[4:47]The trailers were also cleverly distributed in very specific ways.
[4:50]So, for example, the trailer was officially shown in the ad break of the Super Bowl in America.
[4:54]The Super Bowl is one of the biggest sporting events in the entire world, and it has millions and millions of viewers worldwide.
[5:04]So putting your trailer in this very expensive advertising slot, A, it shows that your film is going to be high cost and therefore potentially high quality, but also it's a great way of reaching a really mainstream, global, mostly male audience.
[5:18]The film was released during Black History Month, which was quite a clever choice about when to release the film.
[5:25]It meant that they were able to market the film as being tied to black history and the pride of cultural heritage.
[5:33]And that meant that many other organizations that were also supporting Black History Month and promoting it to their audiences mentioned Black Panther in the run-up to the release of the film.
[5:45]Some people across the world then took this a step further and started to crowd-fund online to make sure that young black children were able to go to the cinema and see this film.
[5:55]So crowdfunding sites were set up to raise money to allow them to go to the cinema because people felt it was so important for young black children to go to the cinema and be able to see a film where there was a cast of predominantly black actors because it happens so rarely in the American film industry.
[6:15]These crowdfunding sites gathered a lot of publicity.
[6:18]So whilst it wasn't necessarily an official marketing technique by Disney, because the audience took this on board and other companies started to help this and donate, it added this extra kind of unofficial marketing for the film because it was mentioned in newspapers and online news quite a lot.
[6:36]Disney also worked in conjunction, a synergetic partnership with New York Fashion Week.
[6:40]They created a fashion show using clothes inspired by the Wakandan clothes in the film, and they called it Welcome to Wakanda.
[6:47]They had an entire fashion show with models going up and down the catwalk.
[6:52]And there's such a huge amount of press and publicity at New York Fashion Week.
[6:58]It's one of the biggest fashion events in the world attended by people globally, not just American, but also it's a really great way of targeting traditionally female audiences who are often ignored almost by superhero movie producers.
[7:13]So using Fashion Week was quite a good way to targeting a more heavily female audience.
[7:18]The trailer for the film was posted onto YouTube by Disney.
[7:22]And in the first 24 hours, it was viewed something like 90 million times.
[7:27]It got a huge number of views on social media.
[7:31]And that is the benefit of using something like YouTube.
[7:34]It's a global platform. It has billions of users. You have the ability to like and share and comment.
[7:42]And so, by the simple act of posting onto this free website, you are enabling your audience to actually market your film for you because they are the ones liking and sharing it with their friends.
[7:51]And so the use of social media is a really clever way to advertise a film globally and very successfully at a very low cost.
[7:59]Likewise, they also used Twitter to market their film.
[8:04]They used hashtags on Twitter, they posted on Twitter as well.
[8:08]And actually Black Panther became the most tweeted about film of 2018.
[8:12]In fact, now, Black Panther is the most tweeted about film ever.
[8:17]I think it's had something like over 35 million tweets.
[8:23]Um, and so, um, it just goes to prove that social media can be a very, very powerful tool for people wanting to share ideas online.
[8:30]People were posting online and telling people about how great the film was, and so social media is a brilliant way of using your audience to spread the word about the film for you.
[8:40]They also used Twitter and some of the more recent technologies like live streaming.
[8:45]So for example, the Black Panther cast and some of the crew like the director and the producer went live on Twitter and did a Q&A session with fans and journalists from around the world.
[8:57]Lots and lots of people tuned in live to look at that Q&A session, and again, that's a great way of building up this kind of anticipation for your film and making it seem like a really big event.
[9:09]The actors from Black Panther went onto several chat shows and also breakfast shows in the morning on television, and they talked about their films on there, and that's also a great way of marketing your film to those national audiences of whatever country those TV shows are on.
[9:27]TV chat shows and breakfast shows are also a good way of appealing to that slightly older target audience who are still tuning into traditional media products like TV shows.
[9:36]The actors also made an appearance at ComicCon.
[9:39]ComicCon is one of the biggest events in the world for fans of comic book, film, TV franchises to come together and to celebrate their interest in these products.
[9:51]You may have seen people getting dressed up at these events, they often have stalls and shows for you to watch, and the actors actually went and did what's called a panel there, whereby they sit at a table in front of a whole load of audiences who've come to see them and they do questions and answers with the audiences, fans can come and talk to them.
[10:07]Um, and it's a great way of targeting really um kind of super fans of your show.
[10:11]And the reason you want to target those kind of ultra fans of the Marvel Comics and the Black Panther universe is that they are the ones that are then potentially going to go on and spread word of mouth about the film to the rest of the audiences.
[10:30]There was even a Snapchat filter for Black Panther, where people could use the Snapchat filter on their faces and photos, and that's a really great way of targeting that young audience who are using Snapchat on a more regular basis for communication with their friends.
[10:43]So this is the end of part one of my video about Black Panther.
[10:48]There is a part two, so if you're interested in getting more relevant information for Black Panther for the A-Level Media Studies exam, please check out part two on my YouTube channel now.
