Cine Kids - Marketing Movies With Free Plastic Toys

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Marketing new movie releases

Of course we all know that every movie needs to be promoted in some way to gain attention from possible future viewers. For big movie releases there's usually a good budget for marketing to make sure that the movie will be picked up quickly and spoken about. The first thing we often do is watch a trailer to discover the movies for our watchlist. You could say that this trailer is a make or break moment for a new release because if your trailer is not being edited well and people stop watching the trailer before it's finished, you're losing viewers even before they started watching the movie.

Marketing options

Besides having a great trailer, more marketing efforts should be made to get people to watch your movie. These marketing options are not just focused on children's movies of course, but there's a reason I'm starting with these topics today. Please keep reading. A lot of buzz for movies happens on several social media as well as creating a website for the movie to direct people to.

For many things it's been proven that word of mouth can be very successful if not the most successful way to market anything. Why that is? Looking back on my own experiences reviewing things it's because people often only take the time to spread the word if something was either really good or really bad. The middle men in between usually don't bother to spread the word. When a movie has been spoken of a lot in your friend circle, it's highly likely that you'll follow your friends and start watching it soon. Repeat this with the next circle of your friends and so on and this can be a very powerful tool to market anything.

The reason behind this post

Of course there's a reason that I'm picking this topic for today's Cine Kids post. I will now tell you what made me write this post today and look at movie marketing in general as well as an introduction of this post. The reason is the plastic waste in fast food restaurants when handing out free children's toys along with their menus. Yes, you read it right, we went to a fast food chain yesterday and once again both my boyfriend and me were highly annoyed by what they hand out in their children's menu.

Plastic waste

Now we all know how they've been trying to get rid of plastic bags for quite a few years now. In Budapest for example, I remember that shops didn't even have any plastic bags anymore, we were all handed paper bags (you needed to pay) or we took our own reusable bags. They did quite a good job there especially considering that all the food delivery services delivered food in paper bags.

Here in Spain, there's still a lot of plastic, unfortunately. Thankfully, most of the stores sending groceries by delivery will use recyclable plastic but still, I have a big suitcase filled with these bags only just from receiving my online groceries. It's too much if you ask me. But there's progress as it's recyclable.

No plastic bags but useless kids toys are fine?

We all know about the plastic soup you can find in the ocean, it's horrible for nature and many animals suffer, or worse, die from the plastic that lands in the ocean. It's horrible and sad that this is still a thing. I never throw plastic on the streets myself but it's a common practice here to just leave your plastic bags, bottles and worse on the street. Living uphill, you can probably guess that eventually it lands downhill in the sea, as we live at the coast. I feel responsible about this when I see it and I hate people being lazy and dumping their shit everywhere.

And then we try to get rid of all these bags from supermarkets/shops etc while at the same time we are indoctrinating our children with kids menus that hand out free plastic (useless) toys. I have tried to avoid ordering a kids menu for a while when we lived in Budapest so that I was not contributing to this problem, because I know I am by buying it for my kid. The reality is that you pay more for the same food if you order it without the menu. Great thinking! People don't like to spend more so by making sure it's cheaper, people will buy it. And so am I.

Not all things are bad

Sometimes they have nice little books that they put in these menus and these are great, I had quite a bit of fun trying to read those in Hungarian or Spanish to my daughter. And honestly, she keeps them and still checks them from time to time. I don't have issues with these toys to market your movie at all. The reality is that often these movie deals these fast food chains have come with plastic garbage toys. I will not go into detail here as I believe most people have encountered some of these toys once or twice in their lives to know what I mean. When I was a child, it was the same although I remember the quality of the toys being much higher compared to the current times. Things need to be produced cheaper and preferably in bigger amounts at the same time.

Children are sensitive for it

My daughter has learned about this game some time ago and watched a few gamers on Youtube with us back then. When we arrive at a fast food chain and she sees the toys from that game being displayed, she's attracted to them immediately. She doesn't care that the toy is useless and plastic waste, and therefore their marketing works well I guess.

Why isn't this forbidden?

I can't understand how these big chains aren't forbidden to produce these useless toys that end up being plastic waste soon enough because either the kid gets bored of it really soon because you can't do anything with the toy, so therefore it's useless. Or they end up breaking it because it's shit quality or it ends up being thrown in the street in some cases because people don't understand the harm they're causing to nature and animals. You can't forbid everything, I get that, but these mass chains get a free pass while the rest of us are being restricted for example buying plastic bags to not harm the planet.

I'd love to hear your thoughts

What's your take on this matter? I know today's post has turned a bit into a rant of sorts but it comes from a person that cares and tries to understand why this is ok. The only thing I can do on my end is not buy these menus anymore unless there's a book in it so the toy is at least useful for my daughter. Do you take into account how your child is being brainwashed by big chains to market their movie by handing out these type of plastic toys?

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

Posted using CineTV