Is modern marketing compatible with modern movies?

One of the things that keeps me optimistic right now is how many good films are doing well in the cinema, and how many young people are going to movies as a collective experience. Movies persist. But even with that, every month some disaster dominates media news. Opening weekend hits and it's all doom and gloom. It's far from the only one but Forgotten Island has been on my mind recently. Incredibly well reviewed. It just didn't do the business. So what went wrong?

The obvious thing to point out is that there are always box office disappointments. Always. Since the dawn of cinema. Not every film resonates. Story isn't a science. Every movie is a gamble. I feel like some of us have forgotten that's how it works. And here's the thing: not every film even gets the chance to resonate because the marketing didn't resonate. Or wasn't even seen. That's not the fault of the movie.

I know there are many factors (cost of cinema tickets versus speed of movies hitting streaming, release conditions, competition, basic audience potential), but I find myself thinking of that marketing piece in particular. And I have to wonder... is it broken? Has modern marketing failed?

Now I haven't been all that close to the marketing world since my advertising days in a different time, a different world. So if you're in marketing right now, I'd love to hear from you if you have insight on all this. But for now, I just had to go digging.

The first question I wanted to answer was: is marketing struggling? Apparently not, team! The advertising market is far bigger than it was 20 years ago. On the surface, it looks like its booming. On a quick google search, it looks like the estimated global spend on major advertising media in 2005 was around $400 billion. Last year in 2025, $1.19 trillion.

But from what I can find out, where the money is going has changed dramatically. Ad agencies, creative production, media agencies and then of course legacy media (newspapers, TV, radio etc) haven't seen all that much of the growth. Instead, Google, Meta, and Amazon are seeing the most gains. It looks like the spend across those three companies is more than the value of than the entire global market back in 2005.

But it's not the same types of marketing. Not even close. And this is where we might just have a failure point when it comes to movies.

Marketing has changed.

Back in the day, we saw the same ads, the same billboards, the same trailers. There was lots of cross-pollination across different interests. I've made this case before but, to quickly recap, you all knew who Hulk Hogan was even if you never watched wrestling whereas, now, someone who really isn't into it likely doesn't know even the biggest modern wrestlers. Culture came together in talk shows, in magazines, in ads, in movies and so on.

But there was something else happening too. We didn't just know about those things. We knew that other people knew about them too. That's really important. They became conversational touchpoints. A movie could become an event before anyone had ever seen it. You might not even have been all that interested at first but you knew it was coming, you knew other people were aware of it and, somewhere along the way, that awareness could become curiosity. Anticipation was collective.

Marketing wasn't just selling to individuals. It was creating shared cultural moments.

Now, we're siloed into algorithms. We can't see what others are seeing. My feed is actually full of wrestlers, as it happens. You might not ever see a single guy in tights. And you're missing out (get some classic Macho Man Randy Savage clips on your feed and your life will improve dramatically) but where I'm going with this is that advertising is so targeted now that it's also exclusionary. An old billboard can be seen by the people it's aimed at... and also everyone else. An Instagram ad can't. It's just seen by the individual on their own individual black brick of oblivion. Targeted advertising can't easily cross-pollinate. It can preach to the converted, it can convert pre-existing interest to a sale, but it struggles to spark, nurture and spread new interest.

In film and television, that's a massive problem. Because if it's not a sequel, prequel or remake, you have to be sold from scratch each time. Every original movie starts from zero. And in our marketing landscape now, that's a hell of a challenge.

Targeted marketing needs a target.

Shrek 5? No problem. Target everyone who has interacted with something related to Shrek and hit them on TikTok, Instagram and so on. A brand new movie? Where do they even start? There can be no pre-existing interest in a movie that hasn't been seen yet. That hasn't been made yet.

Looking at Forgotten Island, there was actually a substantial campaign. It was taken to Comic-Con, Annecy, CinemaCon. They partnered with Jollibee on themed meals and merch. Its YouTube trailer had millions of views. That's all really strong stuff. But CinemaCon is mostly for movie industry people. Annecy? Animation people. Comic-Con, already engaged fans. The Jollibee deal targeted the Filipino connection. And YouTube of course is only targeted and algorithmically distributed. All of those are worthwhile and could have contributed meaningfully to the audience. But I suspect the marketing department had an uphill struggle broadening out reach beyond that simply due to the systems they're dealing with.

And it might even be worse than that. When the algorithms are aggressive, performance marketing could be actively narrowing reach.

If an ad goes out for a new movie and Group A clicks at 2.3% and Group B clicks at 0.4%, ad spend then gets allocated to Group A at the expense of Group B. But Group B could have contained millions of people who, over time, may have grown interest. And Group C never even saw it to begin with. It's a narrowing feedback loop. Short term optimisation can prematurely abandon audiences who need repeated exposure before interest kicks in.

And we also need to take into account that people who might never buy a ticket can still contribute to a film's cultural visibility. Awareness has value beyond their individual conversion.

So I have to wonder if modern marketing, while suited to many kinds of products (I'm guessing, maybe, you tell me) simply doesn't suit what we do. Existing marketing is optimised for harvesting demand. And I think it might just be pretty godawful at creating it. The cultural movie events are rare and, sometimes, seem accidental, as great as Barbenheimer was. It's tough out there for movie marketing people.

And unfortunately I think that has bitten Forgotten Island and many other films in the backside.

What's so sad and funny to me about all of this is, in such a hard market with this huge marketing challenge, movies are deemed a success or failure on opening weekend. Even before it. Like you have just one shot. They're barely given a chance. I get why. Look, there is a lot riding on that opening weekend. But films don't burst into flames and self-destruct after those few days. They persist. They can do well on VOD, they can do well on all sorts of platforms. They can have a resurgence years later. And if given time and a push, they can build an audience and appreciation over time and also, importantly, build revenue. All of those things - people discovering them, talking about them, sharing them - can and do still happen over time.

Zoom out and the history of so many movies is a completely different story to what was told on opening weekend.

While I think much of the modern world is stacked against movies, this long lifespan is still one of their greatest strengths and I think it's crucial that we all remember that. I wouldn't be so quick to write a movie off over opening weekend.

Movies persist.