by Justin Joseph Hall

A colleague asked me to share how working with a publicist has helped me, and what their pricing is like. I hope this answer is useful to you too!

I decided to hire a publicist because I wanted to expand my community in the film industry. Right off the bat, the earlier you can plan the better, because publicity can take a while to gain traction. I haven't had the most success yet with pitching my latest short film, but my experience has been very positive, and laid a solid foundation for future releases.

Abuela’s Luck – Lessons from its Success

I met our publicist, Arrie Ledley of All Communications, through Ricky Rosario, a director/producer I work with. Arrie made sure Ricky was connected to the HBO Latino Film Festival and helped him to plan where to submit his first short film, Abuela’s Luck. She went to all the screenings, coaching and chatting with Ricky before Q&As, helping him prep what to do, and what not to do. Ultimately, Abuela’s Luck was bought by HBO Latin America, so when I had the money to expand my company, Fourwind Films, I brought her on because of the success she helped bring to that project. 

Identifying your target audience and marketing directly to them is probably advice you’ve heard a million times, and this is something that Abuela's Luck was really successful at. Ricky was aware of this from the get-go, which I imagine helped Arrie do her job, so I want to mention it.   Abuela's Luck was hyper-focused to be marketed toward the Latino community and Ricky had a solid audience near home. He also had an emerging star in his film, Shakira Barrera from Netflix’s Glow. Those factors help a lot.  

How My Publicist Helped Me

I hired All Communications to publicize my short film Prologue but also to help with my production company, Fourwind Films.  So let's start with Fourwind Films. Arrie wanted to focus on putting my face to the company, which I had avoided. I mainly use my skills to present other peoples’ works and stories and never thought that I needed to be public-facing. However, Arrie convinced me that personalizing our brand was important, so she first focused on writing up a description and a pitch packet for myself and for Fourwind Films.  She also coached me on focusing on my messaging.  We were somewhat limited because when I hired her, the pandemic had changed the landscape of publicity and no public events were happening.  So we focused on making our messaging more concise, re-working parts on our website, and keeping our social media consistent. Marketing and publicity work in tandem, so bringing up our marketing efforts on social media was meant to build our potential for publicity.

The first thing Arrie said to me is that publicity is a long-term game. Starting early and keeping at it is what builds relationships with other brands. Arrie also doesn't concentrate only on film. She mainly does business in the New Jersey and New York areas.  So for Ricky, it worked really well as one of the biggest Latino Film Festivals run by HBO was here in New York.  As for my film, its themes are concentrated on Women's Rights issues and we're pitching myself and the writer as spokespeople. Our topic and audience are broader, which may be why we didn't hit as great of opportunities as Ricky did off the bat.  Also, I couldn't go to many live events until mid-2021.  But once we got into festivals we did a lot of networking and ideating about how to navigate releasing films in a world that presents more risks for live events. We did achieve our goal of getting into festivals, won two awards, and did a lot of valuable relationship building.

At the moment we're building for my next project. Arrie is identifying markets for my new documentary short that features Marcellus Hall, an artist and musician who has had multiple New Yorker covers. This gives it a marketing hook, and we’re excited to see where it goes.

My Main Takeaways

Success in publicity depends on many things including your own draw, the draw of the product, your target markets, and timing. It’s worth naming that the last two years were insane for everyone, so it was a weird anomaly.  But I feel like we pulled my company into a good position for the future, even though we just did a few online chats with festivals that I probably would have gotten anyway.  But working with Arrie helped me prepare for that, and better understand where I was doing things right and where I wasn't. I rehired her for this year and am looking forward to seeing how the foundational work we’ve done will pay off. She now also represents HBO Latino Film Festival and is making more connections in the film industry, which also helps.

Pricing 

I can only speak from my experience, but I would suggest budgeting at least $750 a month to pay for help with publicity and plan to pay for at least 3 months to start out. This is costly for a short film which is why I chose to meld my publicity goals into a larger plan with my production company.  Keep in mind that once you establish a relationship on one release it's easier to pick up when a new release of yours comes out and you're further along. Publicity is about building relationships with people you're pitching to, but also with your publicist.

Let me know if you have more specific questions, but in general, publicists are relationship builders and bring you into their network, so the more time you can buy from them the more you get out of the relationship.

For more information on working with a publicist or any aspect of film production, please write us at info@fourwindfilms.com, or follow us on Instagram (@fourwindfilms).