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Can Your Film Fail Because of the Title?

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You spend months painstakingly working on something — whether it’s a film, a music project, or something you wanna sell — only to receive a standing ovation from your mother and 1 lonely cricket.

Believe me, I know what that feels like (which is why I started indiefilmTO in the first place).

Now imagine you had a crystal ball that would tell you whether or not your project will be a success on Day 1, rather than waiting for Month 10?

At the core of what I teach at indiefilmTO is a concept called “validation.” 

That is, validating your idea before you premiere it, and I’ll show you exactly what I mean.

Tim Ferriss, the entrepreneur and NYT bestselling author, wasn’t sure what to call his book on time management / self-development. He had three ideas:

  • Millionaire Chameleon
  • Drugs For Fun And Profiteering
  • The 4 Hour Work Week

Drugs For Fun And Profiteering was by far his favorite title, but instead of “going with his gut” he used something that we at indiefilmTO always say is King: data.

(also, Curt is King)

Tim bought $50 worth of Google Adwords and rotated ads with those three titles. Two weeks later, he checked the results and it turns out “4 Hour Work Week” was clicked on 240% MORE than the other titles combined.

And thus, Tim Ferriss is now the multi-millionaire household name you know.

***

Imagine if he had only brainstormed one title instead of three. Or imagine if he just went with his random preference, instead of caring about how his audience perceives things.

Despite having a kick-ass book, no one would know his name.

And this is exactly what it’s like for you film, *|FNAME|*.

Your film may be kick-ass (it fucking better be!) but something as small as validationcan be the difference between you making films “on the side” vs. actually earning a reliable income filmmaking.

Curt’s Variation Tactic For Film Titles / Loglines

 

This is how you can validate a film title, and even a logline.

WARNING: This is ONLY for advanced students, it’s going to get technical very fast.

STEP #1: Choose 4 different loglines / titles that you want to test.

STEP #2: Put them into Google Ads or Facebook Ads and spend $50 USD. Vary only what your testing, and keep everything else fixed. (see below)

Screenshot Example of one of IndieFilmTo's Cilents

This is a real world example from one of my clients.

As you can see, people clicked on the first logline more but the second logline hit more people’s radar. Interesting! Clearly 3 and 4 are losers, but between 1 and 2 is ambiguous.

This is data you would not have gotten anywhere else if you just “went with your gut”!

STEP #3: Wait two weeks for results. (see above)

STEP #4: Congratulate yourself for putting DATA over emotion.

You might find a 10x difference in sales just from this one technique. Plus you’ll get to see what people are searching for as they click on your movie.

At our incubation we’ve used the exact techniques mentioned above to test our films:

“It’s like I have a cheat sheet to what my audience is thinking.” – Mark Boucher, Director / Writer (incubation client)

Or in other words: Data Is King.

So how can you get actual data / feedback on something this week so you can kick your goals in the ass?

Hit reply and let me know. Talk to you soon,

– Curt

PS: What we do at indiefilmTO is fuse psychology with startup methodologies, and apply it to film. Nothing is more central to startups than validation. In fact, whenever I advise other businesses, I always fall back to validation.

PPS: In case you’re curious, we ended up going with logline #2 for this film.

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