Trailers: A Marketing Gimmick
Trailers are the most basic marketing technique out there for movies. A trailer will show snippets from a movie to entice you to see it. These movie trailers are available in three main places. They are in the previews section of DVDs or on television. Free trailers also are available online at the movie’s website or blog. These movies trailers are one of the easiest ways to get people to see a movie that is coming out. They show in a nutshell what will be happening in the movie. An action movie may need a narrator to explain what is going on or to add drama, but a good trailer will be designed with key dialogue and action to show the gist of the movie without any help. There are a couple of problems with trailers, however, that many people do not consider.

Inaccurate Trailers
The first problem is that sometimes a movie trailer really does not indicate what a movie is about. These trailers may have clips to make the movie look funny, for instance, when it is not. Most people have experienced seeing a trailer that made a movie look hysterical or thought-provoking. Then once you saw the movie, you realized that the trailer was not an accurate depiction of the movie. In fact, sometimes the trailers are made before the final cuts of the movie, and they include scenes that are not in the movie. When that happens, people are left thinking not about how great the movie was but about what happened to that scene they saw advertised.

Skipped Trailers
The other major problem with trailers is that not many people are watching them these days. The advent of the DVD player has meant that new movie trailers often are skipped in the process of watching a movie. People who just want to get to the main part of the movie are not willing to watch 13 trailers for new movies. Instead they just skip to what they want to see. The movie industry has stopped this practice in part by setting DVDs so that they have to go through the trailers before they will play the feature presentation, but that frustrates viewers who do not need to watch the trailer before every sitting. Other movie trailers, such as Apple movie trailers, now are available in different formats and so that people can watch them on the IPods or other devices.