ABSTRACT
The most important thing to know about marketing an animated movie is that Filmmakers absolutely must plan ahead. If the Marketing team works with the filmmaking team strategically, they can create all sorts of useful assets that can unfold during the campaign. The marketing group needs to target kids, parents, grandparents, tweens, teens and general audiences. Each of these audiences will respond to the movie in a different way and will require a different sell. This is exactly the same situation as marketing tentpole movies and the animated films are expected to be on that same box office level for the studio. Marketing should work with the filmmakers to identify key scenes that they would like to see finished earlier so they can be used in the campaign. The marketing campaign will rely on heavily on the positive message in the spots they cut for gatekeepers. In animation marketing, a big part of the sell is something called the toolkit.
