In The War for Audience Attention, Niche Down or Perish
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Today on Filmmaker Freedom, the only sustainable way for micro-budget filmmakers to win the brutal war for audience attention.
This is a war being dominated right now by the likes of Netflix, Disney, YouTube, Facebook, and plenty of others.
You might not think you have much chance of competing against companies like this, with their multibillion dollar content and marketing budgets.
But when you shift your focus and niche down, you absolutely can.
In fact, there’s surprising power and freedom in creating niche media in a world where everyone else is obsessed with reaching bigger, broader, more generic audiences.
When done right, it’s a shift that allows you to tell stories you care about to a genuinely receptive audience, and ultimately make a living doing what you love.
Sound good? Let’s get to it.
Becoming a soldier in the war for attention
Attention is a hot commodity these days.
There are multiple billion-dollar industries built on top of the ability to gain and monetize attention. From all types of media, to advertising, to tech platforms and beyond. It’s all fueled by attention.
But attention is also scarce.
There are only so many people in the world, each of us with a finite amount of time and energy to spend on consumption.
This scarcity makes attention even more valuable, and these industries will do whatever it takes to get it. Their survival depends on it.
And that brings us to the first valuable point to consider.
As entrepreneurial filmmakers, we’re at war with everyone else seeking their slice of the limited attention pie.
If we can’t earn and sustain attention for our films, we can’t make a living.
Once we’ve earned attention through our marketing and promotion—and, of course, through making films worthy of attention—there are numerous ways for us to monetize our work.
But make no mistake. Attention is the only thing we can monetize.
It doesn’t matter if we make the greatest film the world has ever known. If no one tunes in, we won’t be able to sustain ourselves financially.
Sure, you might argue that grabbing attention is the job of a distributor. You’re just a creator, so you don’t have to think about this stuff.
But if you’ve followed Filmmaker Freedom for any length of time (or other podcasts like Indie Film Hustle and such), you already know that indie filmmakers can’t rely on traditional distributors anymore.
A small handful of films (usually with large budgets) win that lottery and strike rich deals. But the majority of indie filmmakers get taken advantage of by the traditional distribution apparatus.
Hence the reason we need to take matters into our own hands.
If we want to earn a consistent living making films we’re proud of, we need to become our own studios, and our own distributors.
And the moment we make that decision, we’re automatically duking it out with every other company and industry looking to capture attention.
Know thy enemy in the attention war
So who exactly are we competing against in this war for attention?
“If we want to earn a consistent living making films we’re proud of, we need to become our own studios, and our own distributors.
And the moment we make that decision, we’re automatically duking it out with every other company and industry looking to capture attention.”
For starters, we’re now competing with all of the big movie studios, as well as the likes of Netflix, Disney, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and others.
We’re also competing against everything else on TV. From prestige dramas to sports to reality shows about home renovation.
Same goes for every single piece of media online—from high-end journalism to clickbait listicles to animated gifs of cats.
But it goes deeper.
Every tech platform, including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and hundreds of others are competing for the same limited attention.
And it’s not just the big, multi-billion dollar companies we’re competing against. It’s other indie creators just like us.
Every blog, podcast, YouTube creator, instagram influencer, or kid who streams video games. They’re right there in the trenches with us.
I’m sure you get the point.
Attention is scarce and hugely valuable.
We’re competing against everyone and their mother for our own small slice of it.
And most importantly, we can only make a living if we find a way to sustainably win that war.
If I haven’t scared you off yet, let’s move on.
Mass market attention, and Hollywood’s formula for winning it
Hollywood’s strategy to earn mass market attention has been perfected over decades.
But let’s talk about that phrase, “mass-market” attention.
Basically, they’re trying to reach as many people as humanly possible. It doesn’t matter one lick who those people are. As long as they buy movie tickets, they’re the target.
In the mass marketing ethos, the bigger the scale, and the wider the reach, the better.
(On an interesting sidenote, this is why we see so much influence from China in the film industry these days. It’s a HUGE and somewhat untapped market, and Hollywood goes where the attention is.)
In this paradigm of seeking mass market attention, Hollywood has to play by by a certain set of rules in order to succeed.
Films must be fairly generic, so as to appeal to the broadest possible swath of the moviegoing population. And increasingly, films must be made to appeal to foreign markets as well (China in particular).
The film must lean heavily on A-list talent and celebrity, as well as flashy production value, to draw the mass market in. This drives up the cost of production, which in turn, makes it all the more important to reach the mass market.
They’ve got to spend a shit ton of money to reach people through paid media. Everything from TV ads to billboards to paying social media influencers. The methods are endless, but the common denominator is paying for mass market attention.
Now, the financial rewards for succeeding in this atmosphere are high. Right now, we’re seeing Disney absolutely crush it at the box office with a handful of super successful mega blockbusters.
But with those types of rewards come huge risks and uncertainty. On any given year, you can find a number of flops that lose substantial amounts of money for the major studios.
At this point, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with you as an indie filmmaker?
Well, unless you aspire to work in Hollywood machine, I’d argue the mass market strategy doesn’t have anything to do with you. In fact, it’s probably harming your chances of making a living with your work.
Using Hollywood’s “attention getting” playbook without their resources = recipe for failure
As indie filmmakers, most of us grew up watching Hollywood films and dreaming of one day making our mark on the industry.
To that end, some of us went to film school, while many others learned through the internet and the school of hard knocks.
Regardless of where we learned, most indie filmmakers come away with a similar, and wildly incorrect, notion of how to succeed.
We’re led to believe that if we want to make movies profitably, we need to emulate Hollywood’s playbook for earning audience attention, but do it at a smaller scale.
And this flawed premise leads us to do a lot of counterproductive, expensive things in pursuit of a profitable indie film business.
We reign in our creativity and tell certain types of stories, and only in certain genres, because we believe the moviegoing public won’t accept anything too “out of the box.”
Then we do everything in our power to cast A-list actors. And we need show-stopping visual effects, of course. Because, we’re told, that’s what earns attention these days.
And when it comes time to market our films, we submit to the big festivals. We hire a publicist. We do everything we can to get a bunch of reviews so our Rotten Tomatoes score is legit.
Do all of this stuff, the narrative goes, and we’ll have a shot at earning some of that sweet, sweet attention.
But it’s all bullshit.
As indie filmmakers, when we attempt to play Hollywood’s game, we’re setting ourselves up to lose.
That’s because earning mass market attention is a game of resources.
To compete directly with Netflix and Disney for the same audiences they’re trying to reach, with similar media, you must spend accordingly on content and marketing.
And for indie filmmakers, that’s clearly impossible.
“This particular game is rigged in favor of those with the most resources, so the little guy almost always loses, even if he’s playing by the “right rules.””
But often we play by those rules anyway, because that’s how we’ve been taught to view the game.
It just so happens that this particular game is rigged in favor of those with the most resources, so the little guy almost always loses, even if he’s playing by the “right rules.”
Of course, on rare occasion indie projects break through to the mainstream and win the attention war for a brief time. Think Blair Witch and Napoleon Dynamite and Paranormal Activity.
But those are outliers. Statistical anomalies. Winning lottery tickets.
For the rest of us, we can’t and shouldn’t count on those types of results for our films. Putting your hopes in a lottery ticket has never been a wise strategy for building a business.
Instead, we should be focusing on playing a game we can actually win. And that game, my internet friend, is niching down.
The insane power of niching down
For indie filmmakers, mass market attention is often out of our reach. But when we shift our focus, and play the game of winning niche attention, we’ve got a great shot at winning.
For that to happen, we need to make two crucial shifts. First is making niche films, and second is marketing those films in a specific way.
First, let’s clarify what these concepts of niche making and niche marketing even mean.
Basically, it comes down to identifying a specific group of people who are bound together by shared characteristics, creating work specifically for them based on those characteristics, and marketing directly to them—to the exclusion of the rest of the market.
That’s it. You don’t aim for the mass market. Instead, you craft your work to appeal to specific group of people and market only to them.
In the next article/podcast, we're going to talk about how to identify niche markets, and which shared characteristics to focus on.
But for now, all you need to know is that niche markets are smaller, more specialized, more focused, and much easier/cheaper to reach.
Rob's big-ass list of reasons why niche marketing wins the day for indie filmmakers
Now, I was planning to write out a big, detailed lesson on why focusing on niches is the best strategy for us indie filmmakers. But I think that it works just as well as a series of bullet points.
So try these ideas on for size.
Most niche audiences are dramatically under-served when it comes to films. So by going niche, we can be the biggest, baddest fish in our small pond, as opposed to a tiny microbe in a vast ocean of commoditized media.
When you target a specific niche, you can do precise audience research to find out all sorts of useful stuff—including what they really, deeply want in the stories they consume.
When you create films and content based on what you find in said research, your work will RESONATE in the niche far more than anything Hollywood could ever produce.
The more you tell stories that resonate, the less you'll have to rely on celebrity and production value to draw people in. As such, you can create films more cheaply, and profit more quickly.
The more your work resonates, the more it will be genuinely worthy of people's time, attention, and money.
The more your work resonates, the higher it will convert—meaning you'll have to reach far fewer people to turn a profit.
The more your work resonates—and the more you create additional experiences around the film—the more you'll be able to break free from commoditized pricing and charge more.
The more your work resonates, the more people will recommend it to their likeminded friends, and do your most effective marketing for you, for free.
So yeah, making work that resonates is really fucking important. And it all starts with choosing a niche, understanding that niche, and committing to make stuff just for them.
Building an audience—whether it's an email list, community, or just a social media following—is so much easier and more effective when you target a niche.
And building an audience that you own (meaning you can communicate freely with those people) is the key to a media business that's genuinely sustainable and resilient. An "owned" audience opens doors to other revenue opportunities that most filmmakers never see.
A big part of building that audience is creating content that resonates in the niche, which will draw people towards your list. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
All viable niches have a variety of "influencers" who can help you reach way more potential customers than you'd be able to on your own. This is more powerful than most people realize.
Building mutually beneficial relationships with said influencers gives you the option to reach the niche without spending a dime on ads.
Granted, if you want to advertise, it’s dramatically less expensive when you’re targeting smaller, more specific groups of people.
And last but not least, it’s more fulfilling to serve a specific group of people than it is to make generic media for the mass market.
In fact, by choosing a niche you love, it's possible to create films you're deeply, madly passionate about—and do so profitably—even if those films would never stand a chance in the mass market.
And that, my friends, is why niche filmmaking, and niche marketing, are a far more powerful approach for indie filmmakers than the traditional way of doing things.
Reaching mass markets may be sexy, but it's a game that's hard to even play, let alone win.
However, we can play an entirely different game than Hollywood if we choose.
When we make niche media for a small, but passionate niche audience, we completely change the shitty economics of the film business, and create a set of circumstances that put us in a position to profit consistently from our work.
With this approach, we can actually win the war the attention, while creating work we’re actually proud of.
So yeah, all of this is to say that going niche is the single most powerful shift we can make as indie filmmakers.
And if you’re wondering exactly how to identify the right niche for you, hold tight for the next article.
In next week's post, we'll dive into how to identify viable niches based on shared psychological characteristics.
It’s going to be rad, so I’ll see you next week.
