Marketing: the pragmatic art of posters

In an era where everything but the kitchen sink is moving online, is there much strength left in traditional forms of outdoor advertising? Hansika Bhagani found that the humble movie and TV poster is still very much alive.

Promotional posters may be as old as the moving image itself, but this old marketing and artistic tradition has not lost its relevance. Ahmed Salama, creative director at DLSHS Film says key art is as important as it ever was: “Besides the trailer, the poster is the primary representation a screen project has in the physical world. People think it’s just a poster, but it’s an immensely powerful thing. In some cases it can even add to the entire narrative of a film outside of the cinema”.
Along with Salama’s company (The Combination, Cedar Boys), there is a relatively small circle of creatives that produce most film key art in Australia.

Jeremy Saunders has been among the most prolific. Saunders is a self-taught designer who has worked for many of the big-name Australian film releases, a few of the small ones and some reworked international titles. Although he often begins the process  of design when the film might only be half completed, part of the trick is maintaining a balance between pleasing people and having a strong storytelling sense: “You’ve got a director who is all over the project and has very distinct ideas about how the film should be told, but equally often is too close to the film to be able to step back from a marketing perspective. The producers have obviously been working on the film for years and have a huge interest in making it the sort of campaign they would be proud of. And then again you’ve got the distributor who in most cases is paying for it. So we have to make sure that they are happy and they need to think that as well. But at the same time, you’ve got to avoid compromise with posters, because it never works. People can smell that from a mile away.”

Key art by Jeremy Saunders (click to view full image):