The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has launched Canada’s fall festival season, but film marketing professionals say the campaigns behind these films should begin long before their premiere.

“There’s a misconception that the U.S. makes better film and television content than we do,” Sholeh Alemi Fabbri, founder of Good Measure Productions, tells Playback Daily. “No, they just have better marketing, it isn’t better content.”

As an impact producer, Fabbri is enlisted to give audiences the tools and information to take action after seeing a film. That action can be politically- or socially-motivated, or simply about word of mouth promotion. Impact producing goes past the film’s release, too, extending its shelf life and maintaining audience interest in the project long-term.

“Documentary filmmakers have been paying attention to this idea for a long time. They understood that there were additional audience opportunities,” says Fabbri. “Within the narrative space, people are starting to switch on to the idea that typical, traditional output isn’t necessarily going to find an audience, but bringing in an added level of interest, impact or partnerships can actually drive that.”

A traditional film output, defined by Fabbri, is a festival run followed by a theatrical release and book-ended with a broadcast or streaming launch. She says that can often fall short as audiences are not prioritizing the opening weekend and expect films to be available longer than the first week. However, getting a second week extension is rare for Canadian films, completely killing its momentum.

Using the Barbenheimer (a.k.a. Barbie and Oppenheimer) craze as an example, she says that campaigns take nine months to a year, if not longer, to build up momentum.

“I look at case studies for companies out of the U.S. and their impact campaigns are often as robust as their film’s budget,” says Fabbri. “They made the film over a number of years and they want the campaign to last.”

Fabbri – whose campaigns have spanned from documentaries such as Last of the Right Whales to narrative features like Stupid For You – says an impact campaign ideally begins before a broadcaster and distributor come on board, but the length can be cut short because of budgets, more often on narrative projects.

She says you want to introduce audiences to a film early in its lifecycle. Audiences should interact with it 10 to 12 times whether through social media, word of mouth or advertisement.

A project Fabbri got in early on is Plastic People: The Hidden Crisis of Microplastics (White Pine Pictures), a documentary from Ziya Tong and Ben Addelman that explores the threat of microplastics to humans.

Fabbri boarded the project two years ago, initially looking for partners who could help amplify its reach.

She knew groups concerned about plastics, the environment and human health would be most primed to support the film and developed relationships with 18 impact partners to spread the word. Those partners included the World Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defence and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

To date, the Rockie Award- and Canadian Screen Award-winning film has been selected for 22 film festivals, aired in 21 separate countries and has screened at global events such as an Ottawa meeting for the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution in April 2024.

Fabbri’s work on the film is ongoing, as recently as this year’s Earth Day celebration.

“We were pushing [the doc] back in January to all of our partners … and we had 54 community screenings,” she says. “This was a year after the film had been shown in theatres and on broadcast … and that’s not including the dozens [of community screenings] we’ve had in between.”

For Ally LaMere-Shedden, partner at Toronto’s Route 504 PR, being brought on from conception all the way to the project’s streaming home is ideal for a unit publicist, with eight to 12 weeks being the minimum.

She says that, while distributors understand the importance of publicists, production often considers the film’s publicity last.

“You can get a little more DIY with production. Budgets are quite tight when it comes to independents, especially non-union indie films,” says LaMere-Shedden. “It’s pretty hard to DIY publicity on the festival, theatrical and VOD side.”

LaMere-Shedden says she would like to see more runway for publicists to work on campaigns ahead of release. Filmmakers and creatives tend to have their heads down when working on a project and may not see how publicity affects a film’s lifecycle, especially in areas such as theatrical bookings.

“We get in as early as possible and start spreading the word so that we can get that opening weekend up, get the box office numbers up,” she says. “We really need butts in seats on that opening weekend, so that word of mouth actually has a chance to start spreading.”

In the case of the board game subculture documentary The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop (Vortex Media) from Simon Ennis, Route 504 toured Canada and shot social media content at local game stores ahead of the film’s theatrical and VOD release in July.

The team also partnered with U.S. board game designer Elizabeth Hargrave, hosting Q&A sessions and playing games with locals the night before a screening at a local theatre – such as Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox, Vancouver’s Rio Theatre or Edmonton’s Garneau Theatre – with Ennis in attendance.

“In all three cities, the screenings were sold out, it was rammed,” says LaMere-Shedden. “If we have budgets, we’re able to do things like that, where you can really find the audience for a film.”

On the distributor side, companies such as Toronto’s Game Theory Films have committed to creative, grassroots campaigns to promote their films.

“We would love to have higher budgets and more buy-in and have the films be everywhere,” says Hilary Hart, co-president of Toronto’s Game Theory Films. “But it’s just not where we’re at at this stage.”

A recent example is the campaign for Naomi Jaye’s Darkest Miriam (Younger Daughter Films, Low End). The film, based on Martha Baillie’s novel The Incident Report, stars Severance‘s Britt Lower as a Toronto librarian who develops a romance with a Slovenian immigrant, played by Tom Mercier.

Game Theory worked with Good Measure’s Fabbri on the film’s promotion – the first time the company had enlisted an impact producer – and targeted librarians, beginning with a screening at the Toronto Reference Library. The campaign engaged directly with librarians under the framing of them being “daytime bartenders,” taking on mental health burdens of those who walk through the doors.

“Because we did that screening at the reference library, we had other libraries reach out about doing screenings,” says Hart. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s not a huge spend for what you’re getting out of it, and it can take on a life of its own.”

Riceboy Sleeps (Lonesome Heroes Productions, Kind Stranger Productions, A Lasting Dose Productions) is a key case of a film taking on a life of its own through a promotional campaign. Game Theory and the film’s team engaged Vancouver-based Pender PR for the release and utilized Telefilm’s Back to Cinema campaign to support screenings with second-generation immigrant influencers, who would later dine with director Anthony Shim. The film ended up ranking as the No. 7 North American film on Letterboxd’s list of highest-rated films for 2023 and No. 12 overall.

“There was an awareness that helped to keep the film in theatres in Toronto and Vancouver for over a month,” says Hart. “For a small foreign-language film [with] no star cast, we were really delighted by the way that it performed and the way that people continue to respond to it.”

Next, the company is working with an Indigenous impact producer for Patrick Shannon’s documentary Saints and Warriors and Eva Thomas’ solo feature debut Nika & Madison.

“They have a world of experience and data on how to reach Indigenous communities that we don’t have and that a traditional marketing company might not have,” says Hart. “Having someone on board with that experience is super important for us.”

Image: Unsplash