There is a new job in the film world (relatively new; I held the position in 2006 and I was not alone). A production hires a Producer of Distribution & Marketing to substitute for or in some cases enhance a distributor’s marketing team.

As championed by theatrical marketing wiz Jon Reiss, the PDM starts early in production, building an audience through viral marketing and establishing relationships with potential fans and supporters.

A PDM may sound like a blessing or a redundancy depending on where your strengths and interests lie as filmmaker. If you hate the very idea of marketing, tweeting, or going to networking events, a good PDM can be a godsend. They will shape your marketing strategy and perhaps even give you clarity on your film’s overall message and direction by asking good questions about what audience it will serve.

If you actually enjoy thinking about the marketing strategy for your film and have a handle on who its core audience may be, a PDM may be an expensive option when a few hours with a consultant and a few well-chosen interns could serve as an effective alternative.

Creative and individualized marketing does take experience, work, and inspiration, but there is no boilerplate solution, in new distribution or old.

Here’s Jon advocating the position:

At the Media that Matters film festival this evening, I was chatting with some of the filmmakers about the way they approached their distribution plans early in the production process. I was interested to learn from one of the filmmakers, Ben Herson of African Underground: Hip Hop in Senegal, that though the short is part of a larger project and a feature is almost complete, the original plan was really to create these bite-sized clips, produced and edited in a matter of days, and post them to every available online media outlet possible. Speculatively, one might imagine that this viral approach would be challenging- sure, it’s good to get your work out there, but won’t it just sink into the sea of YouTube, Google Video, and other outlets’ overwhelming volume of content?

The lesson seems to be: no. The good stuff will float. Just as you could go to 30 film festivals in a year and then wonder, “are there amazing films that weren’t submitted/accepted that I am missing?” and as long as you were covering a good range of regions in your fest-going, there probably were not too many undiscovered gems that you didn’t have a chance to see. So a development strategy for filmmakers, especially in documentary, may simply be to blanket the world early on in the project and see if they get noticed. Certainly audience response is not the only reason to make a film, but it is usually an advantage when you are looking for money.