Promotional Campaign Research - The Blair Witch Project

The Blair Witch Project (Independent film)

Independent films usually have a much smaller budget than large films produced by the big Hollywood companies, which is why marketing is much more important for independent films than it is for big name Hollywood films. The Blair Witch Project had a budget of around $20,000 to $25,000. The footage was filmed on handheld cameras, one of which was returned to keep the costs low. For the promotional campaign, the directors, Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, used their production company, Haxan, to create a basic website for the film. Distribution company, Artisan Entertainment then bought the rights to the film and decided that the website would be the main focus of the promotional campaign. Fake police reports and newsreel-style interviews were added to The Blair Witch Project website to keep up the sense of realism. The benefits of doing promotional campaigns online is that they can be shared around easily. The total cost of promotion came to around $1,000,000. However, The Blair Witch Project returned over $248 million  at the box office, the second highest return on investment of any film. There were also promotional trailers posted online and shown on television. The trailers were shown at colleges and were featured on Sci-Fi channels. This helped save money by avoiding cinema advertisements and giving the audience a sense that they found out about the film themselves. Also, the attention to detail was so precise, that on popular film website, IMDB, the actors of the film were shown as 'missing, presumed dead'. This level of detail made it difficult to tell if it was actually real or fake.