Years back, when I was on the marketing faculty at Georgetown University, an undergraduate student who had performed pretty poorly on a test was in my office to grovel for points. From his short-answer responses, it was abundantly clear that he was trying to “B.S.” his way into extra points; I illustrated his lack of substance by pointing out some made-up terminology he was using, like “Just-in-Time Marketing.”

“Just-in-Time Marketing” wasn’t a concept we had learned in the course. (Just-in-Time Manufacturing, yes; Just-in-Time Marketing, not so much).

A few weeks back, I was reminded of my student’s creative term when saw a trailer on television for the film Precious. I can explain.

Back up a few months. I’d heard a lot of buzz about Precious after it screened at Sundance, particularly once the machine that is Oprah got behind the film, along with Tyler Perry.

Once people that I knew started seeing the movie, I kept hearing how horribly depressing and disturbing it is. This invariably was followed by, “…but you’ve got to see it; it’s amazing!” When a friend who works in marketing at Warner Bros. told me I had to go see it, I said, “but I heard it was really disturbing,” and she replied “oh, yeah, I wanted to slit my wrists afterward but it was SO good!” On her way home from Precious, she stopped and bought a DVD copy of The Proposal as a sort of antidote — but still, it was SO good!

As I was heard these reports of Precious, I watched how the marketing of the film changed. I don’t have any inside scoop on how the film was promoted or how its trailers were cut, but here are my observations purely as a member of the film’s target audience.

The initial trailers for Precious focused on the main elements of the film: the life of the main character, her abusive mother (played frighteningly well by actress/comedienne Mo’Nique), her plight as an overweight, illiterate victim of continuous abuse. Not a feel-good flick by any means.

As I heard more reports of how disturbing the film was, I found myself dragging my feet a bit about going to see it. Wouldn’t a splashy, sexy musical like “Nine” be a much nicer thing to see around the holidays? As if in response to this type of thinking, the television trailers began seeing a few weeks in became quite different. 

These focused on the film’s series of short daydreams, in which the main character periodically zones out to imagine herself in glamorous, exciting settings like on a red carpet and performing with her “light-skinned boyfriend” as photographers clamor for her photograph. The trailers almost made Precious look like a feel-good flick! I took the plunge and saw it.

It wasn’t, of course. It was a great film, though, and I’m glad I saw it. Most of the performances were great — so good that they really drew me into the film, which is why it’s so depressing.

I’m sometimes a smidge critical of the film industry for underutilizing tools like marketing research, so here’s credit where it’s due. It appears to me that the folks behind Precious paid attention to reactions and word-of-mouth, and adjusted their promotion accordingly.

Maybe this shift was the result of someone’s gut reaction, or some anecdotal evidence that they saw and used to guide their decisions. I’d like to think, though, that they were reacting to some actual insights, and made changes mid-marketing-program, to the benefit of their product.

What this means is that maybe it’s time I incorporate a term like Just-in-Time Marketing. It would account for such incorporation of opinion and subsequent updating of strategy on the relative fly.

Questions for film marketers:

The product lifecycle of the typical studio film is relatively short and the players many, so it may not be possible to change course on a set promotion strategy or schedule.

Is this something that is typically done or feasible? Is post-release market research typically done or feasible? What other learnings (aside from “get Oprah behind your project”) can we take away from the marketing of Precious?