The Distribution Process

There are several critical things the distributor must consider in order to create a productive campaign:

Who is the target audience?
The distributor will think about the demographic and psychographic profile of the larget audience.
Demographic profile includes: gender, age, socio-eonomic class and ethnicity.
There are many measures used for identifying psychographics proflies, however that most commonly used by advertisers is Young and Rubicam's 4Cs (cross cultural consumer characterisation)

What do the target audience do?
what magazines and newspapersdo they read? where do they travel and how? what are their interests? what other films are they likely to watch?
The distributor will aim to define everything about the audience, in order to maximise profit for the film, by targeting advertising in the most appropriate places. For example, if the audience is unlikely to take public transport, but likely to purchase political magazines the distributor can avoid the tube station posters and instead buy advertising space in The Economist.
The distributor will find out about their audience through surveys and data analysis and will divide their data into three areas:
1) who the audience is
2) what they think
3) their media

Is there a wider audience this film could apeal to?
Major studio projects are so successful because they are mainly family films. Distributors will look for secondry audiences or whether a film has mass audience appeal, they may create a number of different poster campaigns for example in order to appeal to these different audiences. This means they could advertise the film in trailers and posters as action/adventure (mass appeal), then Science Fiction and Romance (secondary audience) if there are elements of these genres in the film.

What majorcast or crew are involved in the project?
The distributor will consider how to maximise the exposure of key cast and crew, measuring the successful of their most recent productions will not only allow the distributor to see what audiences particular stars attract and perhaps widen the audience appeal in the marketing campaign, but it will also allow them to see which see which stars or crew (mainly the director/producer) should feature prominently in the advertising campaign.