Professional Pre-Production: Marketing Research & Style

Before creating promotional materials for The Identity, I feel that it's important to conduct further research into the marketing styles of BBC and AMC. I have previously researched into my broadcasting channel's marketing styles, which can be found here.

BBC Marketing

As I've previously found from research, BBC UK as a whole and BBC One do not create promotional posters, and instead advertise their shows through TV trailers on their own channels and online, and pages on their own websites. Using the series The Night Manager (produced/broadcast by BBC One and AMC), it can be seen that the miniseries was advertised through a TV ad, which can be found on YouTube, and a detailed website page on BBC One's website.

The above image is an example of the ident at the end of a BBC One trailer on YouTube. Amongst my advertising for BBC One, a screenshot-styled image in the exact same style as the above will be made, to appear as a The Identity trailer on BBC's YouTube page.

The Night Manager BBC Home Page

The Night Manager BBC Episodes Page

The Night Manager BBC Clips Page

The Night Manager Characters Page

The above images show BBC One's The Night Manager section. Featuring a home page, episodes, clips and characters, along with a background image of the two main characters.


My Own Website Screenshots

I will be recreating the above pages through singular image manipulations for my own series. Note: I will not be making a BBC One or AMC website page as this is undo-able, I will be making flat images that appear like website page screenshots.

Home - My BBC One The Identity home page would similarly feature two promotional images that I will produce from cast & location images through Photoshop. Along with a log line and fake articles.

Episodes - My Episodes page will need to have images removed, as I don't have supporting images from my fake miniseries. However, an episode list and descriptions will be added.

Clips - Using my previously made concept images of The Identity scenes, along with interview images of my cast found online, I will create a fake clips page with descriptions and titles.

Characters - My Characters page will feature character names, cast images from online sources, and cast names.


I think that both the above pretend YouTube trailer and pretend The Identity BBC One website pages will create a lot of realism in the idea of marketing the miniseries in the UK.

AMC Marketing

AMC also typically create pages/sections for their series on AMC's website, however the channel also highly uses promotional posters for marketing, which can be found advertised online and in public places, such as on billboards and busses. Again, using The Night Manager as an example, website pages and posters can be seen to promote the miniseries.

The Night Manager AMC Episodes/Home Page

The Night Manager AMC Cast & Crew Page

The Night Manager AMC About Page

The above images show the main/episodes page of The Night Manager on AMC's website, along with exclusives, talk, cast & crew and about. However, I'm unable to create the exclusives page as the purpose of the page is about interactivity on the website - which has no purpose in a screenshot, and I'm unable to create the talk page as this heavily features a large amount of episode screenshots and cast & crew interviews - which, being a fake show, I don't have that content available.


My Own Website Screenshots

I'm able to create the episodes page, the cast & crew page, and the about page for The Identity's AMC section in screenshot forms.

Episodes/Main - In line with the above example, my episodes page will feature one of my aforementioned promotional images to be used for the background, the series' logo, the log-line, and episode list & descriptions, accompanied by my concept images for the episode images.

Cast & Crew - Similar to BBC's website, this will feature character names, character descriptions, cast images from online sources, and cast names.

About - This page will feature a shortened series synopsis, a promotional image, and online images of the cast to be used for fake clips.



Using The Night Manager again, along with other AMC TV series, below are a number of poster styles created by the channel.

Varying in layout from landscape to portrait, and varying in colouring, themes and imagery, AMC's posters seem to be extremely varied and creatively open depending on what they are representing.

Influence on my own Posters

When creating my own posters for The Identity, I plan to create 5 different portrait promotional posters - and one of those will be remade in landscape form.

The elements and creative styles that I plan to use in my posters, with inspiration from the above examples, are...

• Black and white images - as this allows me to make each cast image taken from online to look more similar to each other than they would if they were all different colours, giving the posters continuity.
• Colour schemes of blacks, whites, greys, blues and reds, as they fit the atmosphere of the series.
• Close up images of the main cast members as the background for each poster, similar to the above The Killing example. This would mean creating one poster for Lauren's image, another for Helen, another for Ethan, a joint poster for Frank and Kathleen, and a poster for Amanda. I feel that as Chris is such a minor character, it doesn't seem appropriate to give him his own poster.
• Taglines on each poster, suited to the character that features on them. Such as in the above Breaking Bad poster, the tagline that features on that poster is a quote of the character showed in the image. I think adding taglines to each poster gives them their own character representations. I plan to think up a number of taglines that will suit each poster.
• AMC Features: 'A New Original Series', series title/logo, 'Wednesdays 9/8c', and the AMC logo.

Lastly, after researching where AMC posters are typically advertised in public places, I found that large billboards and bus advertisements are used to advertise AMC series posters in America. These types of promotions are used to great effect in capturing the public's attention in day to day life - drawing in more viewers.

Mad Men bus ad example

The Night Manager billboard example

In line with these typical advertisements, I will create fake examples of The Identity being promoted through a bus advertisement and a billboard in America, creating more realistic marketing styles. Both the bus ad and the billboard will be Lauren's poster (promoting the main character), transformed into a landscape style, featuring all of the same elements/components that are listed above but displayed appropriately for each advertising style.

In short, my promotional materials/marketing will consist of...

• Fake BBC One website pages
• Fake AMC website pages
• A fake BBC One YouTube trailer screenshot
• Five separate character AMC promotional posters - with extra transformations of Lauren's poster for...
• A promotional billboard example and a bus advertisement example

All manipulated and created through Photoshop.

Both BBC One and AMC's marketing styles have been extremely helpful in my decisions of the promotional materials to create alongside their overall appearances, and the ways that my miniseries would be realistically and conventionally marketed by both channels. I think the marketing of The Identity will be very broad and creative.