Retaining Control - Why and How

Retaining control of your distribution through direct sales yields multiple benefits for the filmmaker:

1. 1.Maximizes your share of the revenue.
   

2. 2.Lowers the unit cost-of-sale (which is the money you spend to acquire each sale)
   

3. 3.Builds your own audience base (and you own the purchaser/subscriber mailing list, which has intrinsic value all by itself.)
   

4. 4.Gives you greater leverage with retail distributors
   

By starting out small with micro-budgets productions, retaining distribution control is realistic and achievable by the independent producer. The larger your production budget, the more you lose control of distribution, unless along the way, you have been building up your "command, control, and communications" organization. C-Cubed or C3 is an information systems approach developed by the military as part of their battlefield doctrine. You have to approach your film campaign in the same manner. You are fighting for attention in a crowded, fragmented, and noisy cinema and media battlefront. How you advance, take ground, and win the campaign will be determined by how many high-yield assets you are able to "command," how you "control" your resources through leverage, and how cost-effectively you "communicate" to your audience.

Let's continue with the military analogy to illustrate this further. As a military commander you would prefer commanding tanks, canons and machine guns as "high-yield" assets versus making do with humvees, grenades, and a single-shot rifles. When you need to go beyond normal channel in order to control how much gasoline your motor division must be allocated, you would rather be friends with a two-star general at quartermaster headquarters than be the buddy of a corporal running the transportation-pool. That's leverage. To send orders to your troops in the field or call headquarters for reinforcements, you would prefer to communicate via battle-hardened satellite phones versus a walkie-talkie from Radio Shack. It may cost more to make the satellite call, but it could mean saving the lives of your troops.

Developing a successful C-Cubed campaign requires four major factors that must be identified and obtained BEFORE the filmmaker raises funds and begins film production. These ingredients are:

1. 1.One or more large organizations with whom you can have a mutually beneficial relationship.
   

2. 2.Pre-existing sales and/or communications channels within your target market. 
   

3. 3.An audience hungry for your kind of storytelling, who appreciate the value of your message, and have a desire to support the mission of your company.
   

4. 4.Your product naturally facilitates multiple or repeat sales.
   

I must reiterate the importance of the factors above because they are CRITICAL to success. ALL of these elements must be PRE-DETERMINED and/or ACQUIRED before you launch your film company or mount a production. Most filmmakers fail to plan beyond the final cut, hence they have unknowingly planned to fail. They jump into a film project all excited, full of energy, heady with dreams, their award speeches already swimming in their head as they wrap up principal photography. With their last energy and dollars, they struggle through post-production. At the end, their movie comes out. They bank everything on being discovered at film festivals. If they are incredibly lucky, they sign with a sub-distributor. Prints and ads are made. Local reviews may even regard their film as a cinematic gem. But then nobody sees it on opening weekend because it ran against another "SpiderMan" movie or it snowed that weekend. Months later unsold DVDs are returned. Their movie goes on the distributor's shelf for 15-20 years since the filmmaker signed over theatrical and DVD rights to the distributor for what turned out to be a paltry advance. The filmmaker joins the statistical rank of 3,000 other indie directors who made a movie that year. 

Don't be a statistic.

Be a STOP-SIGN on a one-way, single lane road. 

Huh? Why a STOP-SIGN?

You want people to STOP and pay attention to your movie. If you have incorporated the factors described above, then people are already on the road that you or your partners have paved. It's one-way because your message is headed in the same direction as is your audience. It's a single road because your movie is the only vehicle on the road (for the moment) because you controlled it that way.

Now that you know the rationale and principle behind retaining control of distribution, Part 5 will explain how Advent Film Group is implementing this plan.