How to Market Indie Films

Jenn: Hey, Britt.

Brittany: Hey, Jenn.

Jenn: So, have you seen any good movies lately?

Brittany: I actually am going to see the drama tomorrow night and I'm really excited about it.

Jenn: Heard it's good. Heard it, well, you know, I mean, it's not horror. You know me, I only really watch horror movies. So, I can't, I have not seen that one. But my love for horror, my love for indie, I think you're really gonna like today's guest. I invited Kelli McNeil Yellin, who is the founder of KLA Media Group. But what's really interesting about her is that she's an indie filmmaker. She actually released and produced her own independent film, Daruma. And she has other amazing, really exciting projects in the pipeline. And she's going to talk to us today about how to market indie films because there's a very specific art and science to it. And it's not like your traditional Hollywood big picture. There's a lot more involved into getting an indie film recognized. So that is our guest today. And I think you're really going to enjoy talking to her.

Brittany: I think so too. And I think anyone willing to get right down to it and start marketing their own project because they're not happy with how others are reacting to it is someone worthwhile talking to.

Jenn: Oh yeah, she took matters into her own hands, realized the people that can market my film the best is me. And so she has a really cool story. She has a lot of really great insight and I'm really excited to bring her on. So let's welcome Kelli. There's an old belief that if you write an incredible book or produce a catchy song that the audience is sure to follow. But that's not always the case, especially in the film industry. In today's landscape, specifically for indie creators, the work doesn't end when the film is complete. In fact, that's when it really begins. Today's episode is going to cover this very subject, how to market indie films, and we're so thrilled to welcome Kelli McNeil Yellin, veteran PR expert and filmmaker, who is here to share insights from both sides of the lens. Kelli has written and produced her own independent feature, Daruma, and founded KLA Media Group, a consultancy focused on helping indie filmmakers find their audiences and expertly market their films. We'll dive into navigating PR, marketing, and everything in between when it comes to your next film project. Hi, Kelli. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Kelli: Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Brittany: We're happy to have you here, Kelli. Before we dive into your work as an indie filmmaker. Can you give our listeners a little background on how you got started in this field?

Kelli: I would be happy to give some background as to how I got started in this field. I was a theater major at the University of Southern California. As a high school teenager growing up in Texas, I competed in a number of speech and theater debates and I found theater by way of that and USC found me by way of competing in those competitions. So public speaking, prose and poetry, those types of competitions. And I made my way out to Los Angeles. And as a theater major, not knowing anybody in Los Angeles at the age of 18, which I just think is a wild thing to have done at this point now that I have some years behind me, I knew instinctively that I was going to need to have some sort of a fallback career. And I minored in visual media and communications. So I added that on top of my bachelor's degree. And my senior year of college, I came down with an illness that prevented me from working at the time. I was doing things like catering, bartending, promotional modeling, those types of things. And I needed a job because I had to pay for my expenses and my rent and all those things. And I ended up getting an internship at a small mom and pop PR firm in Hollywood. And that was my first real exposure to how public relations works. And I was kind of hooked on it. And we had some very interesting clients. Maybe on another episode, I'll dive into some of the wacky stuff that we did to attract, attention for those clients.

Jenn: Oh my God, yes, I would love that. I bet you have so many stories.

Kelli: Yeah, it was, we had some, I mean, listen, we had some great clients. You know, we had the Hollywood Sign Trust. And we had Mount Sinai. I mean, we had some really interesting stuff, but those were halcyon days looking back at those moments. But anybody that's a creative, especially out here in Los Angeles or no matter where you're at, if you're trying to pursue a career in the arts, many people have fallback careers. And that can be, like I mentioned earlier, catering, bartending, something like that. Or you'll get a corporate job or a desk job. And for me, as I'm coming out of college, I'm like, okay, I have to support myself. I have to continue to keep this up. So I continued my career in PR and marketing. At the same time, I was working on transitioning into becoming a writer. I discovered that my true love, my true passion is in writing and producing. And I was really trying to transition into that. So throughout that entire time, I kept growing my knowledge base and my skill sets. I worked for startups. I worked for Fortune 50 companies. Companies. So I have a real understanding of what it's like to be at a very high level of corporate marketing, but also very on the ground as well. And when it came time to make my own film, which I will tell the listeners that Daruma took 17 years for us to make because it's really hard to make anything in this town, especially the material that we're trying to produce. But as I started to work to put together that film, I always hoped that at some point a distributor or somebody would come in and take the wheel and take it off my hands and do the work for me. And as I got deeper and deeper into the filmmaking process, and certainly as we were releasing the film, I realized that wasn't the case. That's not how it works. And also by means of necessity, I was like, I have no budget to really hire somebody to do the work that I know needs to be done on this film. So I guess I'm going to be doing it. So that's how I got started and how I ended up here. And after I released my film, I ended up having a number of filmmakers come to me and say, how did you do that? Would you work with me? Would you consult with me? And the interesting thing is, that I had no intention of opening up my own practice to do this for other filmmakers, but the need was there and I had the expertise and I come from the advantage of having made a film. I'm not just a public relations person who sees things from a public relations point of view, but I know intimately how film distribution and marketing works from a producer standpoint as well. And that makes me very uniquely suited to do what I do. And I cannot believe I get to do this for a living. It's absolutely incredible. So I count myself very lucky and I'm very grateful for my clients.

Jenn: And I, yeah, and what makes your trajectory so interesting is that you did have, like you said, you have the filmmaking side and the PR side. And I want to ask you to dive in a little bit more when you said filmmakers have come up to you and asked, can you consult with me? Can you help me? What did you what do you sort of immediately realize that either filmmakers are not realizing about marketing their films or what's like the gap right now in the industry that you uncovered and you untapped? So can you talk a little bit more about people coming to you and how you've moved forward in sort of helping them promote and market their projects.

Kelli: I think everybody is aware that Hollywood is undergoing a foundational, transformational shift right now in terms of consolidation. And what I want to try to tap into is I want to explain the current ecosystem of Hollywood. And many people think that, oh, you've made a film, you must be wealthy, you're selling it, you're getting out there in the world, you're living the dream. Most people who are not in the industry, in the business, don't understand that most filmmakers don't have two sticks to rub together. It is such a scrappy, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know, industry where many studios at this point are not taking the risks on buying an independent film because it doesn't have a proven audience. It's not backed by IP. Most independent films don't have a lead name. Something that an international sales agent can say, yeah, we can do foreign sales by attaching this actor or this cast member. So that ecosystem that persisted for decades is no longer there. And if you look at the way that the trajectory of the industry has changed, peak TV happened in the mid-2010s, and these platforms, Amazon, Netflix, all of these studios were acquiring content from independent filmmakers like myself, like hundreds of other filmmakers. because they were trying to build up their libraries and attain market share because they wanted users to come to their platforms. So for the first part of the way that these platforms operated, they weren't really accountable to making money. They were acquiring the user base. They were trying to diversify their content as much as possible. Well, now they're in the business of making content and there's no need for them to go outside of their own ecosystem to do acquisitions. So when COVID happened, that's when the bottom of peak TV and acquisitions really started to fall out for independent filmmakers. And it's only gotten worse since then. Most independent films, even films that premiere at Sundance, Tribeca, TIFF, most of them come in and they don't have a buyer. So the days of people, producers, studios bidding on these independent films, like everyone knows the story about Little Miss Sunshine and how that was like a midnight auction deal and how that kind of went through, that was back in what, 2005, 2006? That was 20 years ago. That's just not how it's done now. So if you go and look at the way films are coming out of these larger festivals, they're ending up not having a home. And most of those films end up on the same trajectory where you'll do, you may be lucky to do a theatrical release on it, but then you'll go into a TVOD phase, which is basically when you, it's the transactional video on demand and people can rent the film. But the customer has been so conditioned now when you go on Amazon or Netflix or something, you're going onto a platform and you're saying, well, I'm not going to rent that. I'm not going to pay for that because I'm just going to wait for it to come out for free. So in that way, there's been a huge way of shift of thinking in the way that the consumer consumes the product. So many filmmakers right now are finding themselves in this middle territory where they're like, I don't know what to do with this film. And I think that it's created a real need. There's a gap in the marketplace. And right now, we are all being pioneers, finding our way towards a path to not only distributing the films, but a path to profitability or whatever the filmmakers' goals are. It's a really challenging time right now. And a lot of the core work that I do is I work with my clients to find out, okay, what is the path that we can go to success? What are you looking to do? Are you looking to recoup profits? Are you looking to build a community? Are you looking to make a name for yourself? Are you looking to change the world? It's very important that as we begin our work together, we work with a very clear set of goals because it may not, the finances on any film may not ever come back to the filmmaker. That's just the reality today.

Brittany: I want to talk about Daruma, a film that you wrote that received widespread acclaim. We kind of talked about the moment where you realized you were on your own for marketing for it, but what inspired you to write it? Let's take it a little further back. What kind of led up to the moment where you were like, this is what I'm going to begin working on?

Kelli: The reason that I started working on Daruma is because I noticed another gap in the marketplace. Disability has been something that's touched my life ever since I was a child. I grew up signing. And then we had a spinal cord injury in my family in the early 2000s. And at the time, the only film that was out that was representative of somebody with a spinal cord injury was Million Dollar Baby. And the narrative of that story was that death is better than living with a disability. And I'll be quite frank, I really, really despised that movie. And the reason I didn't like it was because the person in my family whom the movie is not based on, I have to stipulate that. It's not based on them. they had a very full life, family, school, job, all kinds of things. And I thought, I can make something better. I can make something that is authentic. I can make something that tells this type of a story that doesn't focus on somebody with an able body. Getting an injury and then the trajectory of that movie is overcoming that injury. I just wanted to tell a story that was representational and authentic where the disability was already there and it was just, it was a footnote. And that was something that for a long time I took around, I shopped it around. Sorry, I'm gonna block that line back. You know, my agents didn't wanna touch it, producers didn't wanna touch it because authentic disability representation in film and television wasn't really a thing. I mean, if you look at the Oscars over the last, 50, 60 years or whatever, many of those awards, the top actor, top actress have gone to actors who are able-bodied playing characters with disability. Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Sean Penn in I Am Sam, you know, a number of those things. And the community calls it **** face. And it's not something that's really acceptable. So we had a really hard time putting this film together because nobody wanted to take the risk on not only one authentically cast lead for disability, but two. Because my lead, my movie stars two men with disabilities in a movie that is not about overcoming disability. The movie is about a man with a spinal cord injury who discovers that he has a daughter from a forgotten fling from years ago. And he must take the girl after the mother passes away. And then he very quickly realizes that he can't parent her. And he then ends up having to take her across the country to live with her maternal grandparents. And the grandfather is played by the incredible Barry Bostwick of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Golden Globe winner. He is an astonishing actor and does so much with so little and is just the kindest person. But that's the trajectory of the movie. And it's an emotional journey. And one of the first people that believed in the script and helped me get it made was my husband, Alexander Yellin, who is a very prolific cinematographer and director. And he likes to tell the story that he asked to read one of my scripts when we first started dating, because if you're going to be two creatives and especially working in the same field, well, you better get to know each other's artwork. So at the time, I gave him the script and I didn't want to, I'm very personal about my work. As thick of an external persona that I may exhibit, I'm like a marshmallow inside and I'm very sensitive. So I let him read the script and within a few minutes I hear him laughing in the other room and I run in and I'm like, what are you, what is so funny? I don't know, what's going on? He's like, this is hysterical. And I'm like, this is a drama. And he's like, no, this is a dark comedy. He's like, what are you going to do with this? And I said, I don't know. I've tried for a while to get it made and nobody really wants to touch it. So I don't know what to do. And he said, well, if we find a way to make it, I'll direct it. And we like to joke that, he did that, even before he got down on one knee and said, will you marry me? He said, will you direct my movie? Or can I direct your movie for you? So that's how all of that got kicked off. And at the time, there was a crowdfunding platform that came out called Seed&Spark. So, you know, because we weren't dealing with enough in 2019, you know, we were planning our wedding and all the other things. We also conducted a crowdfunding phase. And at that point, you know, we were doing a, you know, minimal lift for trying to get funds together. But what we were really doing at that point when we were doing our crowdfunding campaign was we were building our audience. And I didn't realize it at the time. But all that work that I had did, even in 2019, actually even as far back as 2018, because we had shot a proof of concept. And if you're not familiar with the proof of concept, a proof of concept is a section of the film or, just it's a small, 3, 5, 10 minute, however long you want to make it. of your project just to show investors, audience members, what you're doing. Are you a capable filmmaker? Can you tell a story? And we put that proof of concept together in 2018. And what I was saying is that all that work that we were doing, we were doing the proof of concept, we did the crowdfunding, we connected with partner organizations. The name for that is impact producing. And I was doing that, not realizing that I was doing something that is a actual field today in the field of film and television marketing. And impact producing is something that really directly affects communities. So that is a core component of the work that I do. I work with a lot of nonprofits to connect them with storytellers in the films that fits particular niches. We help them give a lift. A lot of the films that I work with are from marginalized communities, whether or not that's the LGBTQ community, minorities, people with disabilities. I work very specifically within that space. And I love it. I think it's incredible. But again, I didn't know that that's what I was doing at the time. And in the end, we ended up shooting our film in 2022 in Los Angeles. During the Omicron surge of the pandemic on a union contract for three weeks, which was just the most nail-biting shoot ever, because at that point, if somebody came down with the case of COVID, the SAG rules mandated that production would have to stop entirely and you'd have to quarantine the actors and pay them up to 10 days. Well, that's going to completely kill the budget on an independent film. But we had such an amazing cast and crew who believed so fully in the project and what we were doing that everybody was masking up and making sure nobody got sick. And we didn't have a single outbreak of COVID on our sets. And we completed production of the film. And fast forward, 18 months later, the film finally premiered in the summer of 2023, right when the actor strikes happened. So we, it's our timing was really bad, I think, on everything. So not only did the market fall out for independent film, but we're also dealing with the very volatile things happening completely out of our control in terms of actor strikes. There's so many things that you just can't control in terms of filmmaking. And I think that just dovetails very nicely into there's just so many things that you can't control when you're doing public relations. Because you have no editorial control over what's going to happen with a story. I've done things with PR before. I'm working with an incredible filmmaking team out of Canada and they, this is currently, and we had this amazing segment lined up for them and we were gonna shoot something out in LA. You know, I had one of the major studio or networks out here, they were doing it, but breaking news kept interrupting the day that we were supposed to shoot the segment and it ended up not going. And that's heartbreaking, but I think that, in terms of public relations and also in terms of filmmaking, you have to be creative and you have to understand that there's just so many things outside of your control and your job is to figure out the best path forward with the tools that you have available to you.

Jenn: That's amazing. It's so much I want to say. I don't even know where to start. So it's funny because your film took 17 years. And I think it's just very interesting that you said nobody wanted to touch it at first. Yet so long ago, to your point, and you've named a couple of those movies already, there was a lot of people portraying disabilities whether physically or mentally, that now today that would not happen, right? Today everybody wants authenticity. So you were like a little bit ahead of your time, in a sense, in creating this film. And I love that your husband got involved with it the way he did. And it sounds like the collaboration was just like the perfect match. And I kind of to go back what I was originally saying. So there's a lot of a lot of things have changed in the marketing realm and the filmmaking industry, of course. And you touched on COVID, you touched on the writer strike. All of those elements are part of that, right? And like you said, there's a lot of things that are going to come along the way that are going to interfere with whether it's producing the film, writing the film, directing the film, whatever. So what do you think about what has changed in your opinion since you've been doing this for so long now in indie film marketing? What has fundamentally changed in your opinion within the last five to 10 years outside of some of the things that you already touched on like the pandemic?

Kelli: One of the things that has fundamentally changed over the last few years is the way that filmmakers are not only talking to each other, but the spaces that they're developing. And whether that's them speaking in Facebook groups or on Substack where I'm very active in what's called the Film Stack community or on Discord servers. But we're all developing a common language as to what's happening because we were all in the weeds in 2023, 2024. Nobody knew what was happening. But now we have a common language to identify what is happening in Hollywood and in the film market. And some of those terms are things like techno feudalism, platform crapification, planned obsolescence, and platform decay. I love to give the analogy of what really those things make. So when the studios came in, whether that was Netflix or whatever Amazon Studios came in, they came in as disruptors to break an existing model. So the studio model had been working for over a century, which I would like to say, by the way, that the original Hollywood was founded by filmmakers escaping Thomas Edison's control. So I don't know if users know that. But in the late 1800s, early 1900s, Thomas Edison ran Black Maria Studios in New Jersey, and he controlled the filming, he controlled the production, he controlled the output and the distribution because he had patents on the cameras, he had patents on the projectors, all kinds of stuff. And filmmakers there, anytime that they would use his equipment without the proper licensing, he would literally send hired thugs to their studios to harass them and hurt them. So they ended up moving out west. And that was because the judges out here were less favorable towards existing patent laws. It was really harder to get at them. And that's how Hollywood was founded. Hollywood was founded by independent filmmakers escaping this monopoly. And then of course, that's where we got Universal Artists and all these great studios. And then of course, in the 1940s, we had the Paramount decrees because there was the verticalization of studios. So we're seeing this again. And I think that because history repeats itself, we're seeing this very vertical consolidation at the top, which obviously, we're seeing play out right now in real time between the merger that's happening between Paramount and Warner Brothers, which by the way, I have put my name on a petition, asking them to stop the merger because not only is this bad for Hollywood, it's bad for democracy because it's a consolidation of the media platforms at the top. And I do want filmmakers to think about this a little selfishly too. They're like, well, I don't really care about news outlets. Well, they care about news outlets when it comes time to promote their films. So if there are less news outlets that I can go to say, hey, would you be interested in covering this independent film? Because most of the news outlets at the top really only want to cover larger studio productions. So the ecosystem is so intricately intertwined in terms of where independent filmmakers are their independent news outlets are. So I think right now the dialogue that's happening around that, filmmakers are understanding it. That wasn't the case a couple of years ago. So I think everybody is very acutely aware of what is happening in the space, in media across the board. That's one of the most fundamental shifts that I've seen happening.

Brittany: You've given us some incredible insight on kind of what it takes to market a film and what it takes to start and spend 17 years building out this dream. At what point in the filmmaking process should marketing start and what does that look like in practice?

Kelli: Marketing should start in the filmmaking process before you even pick up a camera. I firmly believe in building your audience as you go along because what's happening now is people are not really just going to see movies, they're going to go see creators. And I'm going to use the filmmaker Markiplier as an outlier for this. And this was a YouTuber who had something like 34 million subscribers. And he went on to make a film called Iron Lung, which he released independently in theaters, and it made millions of dollars. And Markiplier was using his existing audience basically as a proof of concept. Every time he was posting on YouTube or doing a video or something like that, he then translated all of that into making a film. So in the same way that I was doing impact producing as I was starting to put my film together, that was, if you think about that, we were doing that in 2018, which was, four years before we even got to pick up the camera and start making the movie. But doing that in that way, when our film premiered, at a film festival and when we screened at Slamdance, which was taking place in the shadow of Sundance, which is, both of those festivals are no longer in Park City, I feel incredibly lucky that we got to screen in Park City because that is a huge filmmaker's dream. But I sold out both of those screenings in part because of all of the groundwork that I had done up front and because of the brand partnerships that I had put together when I screened the festival. But at that point too, we had built such trust within the community, the disability community, that the organizations were supporting us. We had the audience base. And then Oscar winner Peter Farrelly came on as our executive producer to help give the film an additional lift. And Peter and his brother Bobby have been very active in the disability space for decades. I don't know if you're familiar with their work, but Peter's friends had an accident, had a spinal cord injury when they were teenagers. And they've remained friends. And when he made something about Mary and he cast a disabled child, or maybe it was Dumb and Dumber, I'm not quite sure which film it was, but the friend said, you know, did you cast a real blind kid? And Peter said, no. And the guy said, well, why didn't you do that? And Peter said, I don't know. So he's made it a point for every other single film that he's made to cast authentically in some role that has nothing to do with a disability or something like that. But they saw the real value in what we had done with our film. And they said, this is a great movie. Put our names on it to help you get to the additional boost. In that way, we used everything that we had been building towards to really build up the momentum for the film. So again, I mean, this happened. This was years in the making. And I'm not saying that should take every film 17 years to make. This is how long it took this one to make. But then again, it was my first one. And I will say my husband and I are making other films together. And those are in progress now. But those wouldn't have happened had we not taken the leap and undone our first one.

Jenn: All of that's great. I want to ask a little bit about the PR side of it. I feel that a lot of filmmakers and I could be wrong, but they think, getting into festivals like Sundance or, landing a New York Times feature is the goal. And I want to you've talked a lot about the marketing of it and the process behind a film. I'd love to know, especially with your expertise, what about the PR? What type of PR actually works when you're putting together an indie film?

Kelli: I look at a lot of other business models to help inform the way that I position films and I put together the marketing and the PR plans. Because if you look at other industries like music or books or something like that, they are very, they're different, but they are similar in the sense that people consume the product in the same manner. I mean, we're all right now on social media, we're all on Amazon. There's just, there's limited spaces where people can consume films and music and books right now for the time being. I was listening to a podcast the other day about a publisher who was talking about how, you know, what actually moves the needle in terms of sales. And I think that's what everybody really wants to do is, when you make something creatively, you would like to recoup money, you would like to sell it. So they were saying that a major morning show where they did a blurb on the book translated to something like maybe 30 copies sold. An organic non-partnered post with Stanley Tucci mentioning the book, moved hundreds of copies of the book. So I think that the really interesting thing that's happening right now is while these larger outlets are, you know, it's great. Everybody wants to be in the New York Times. Everybody wants to be in the trades. Everybody wants to have that feather in the cap. And I actually think that's great because I'm very supportive of media and legacy outlets and journalism. And I do worry sometimes that the line between, you know, journalism and influencer journalism gets blurred too much. So I do want these older outlets to stay. I want them to remain strong. But in terms of public relations, it's really important for filmmakers to understand that is not the brass ring it used to be because not everybody is dialed into those spaces. And most of us get our news from other people. We get it from social media. We get it from the clipping services, which are really large right now. And also, I read something earlier this year that this is not the year of the major influencer. So kind of gone are the days where having millions of followers is going to move the needle on sales. And most marketers and PR professionals are moving into more niche spaces and working with micro-influencers. Because I think audiences know now if you have an influencer who's got millions of followers and they're selling you some sort of, beauty product or, supplement or whatever it is. I think audiences are smart enough to know that this is somebody who's getting paid and they may or may not use the product, so it may or may not be any good. But if you go to somebody with a smaller niche audience that you like and you follow and you trust, they are more likely to purchase said product or do the thing. So what's really interesting right now is I do think that this kind of dovetails into the cultural zeitgeist that we're in right now, because culturally, I think people are craving things that are human and are authentic. They're not, you know, come up with, you know, they're not generated by AI slop. So I think people are really seeking out authentic spaces. And that's a really good thing for filmmakers because you don't have to put the pressure on yourself to get into those larger outlets. You can actually derive incredible value by working with smaller outlets, which let's be honest, as a PR professional, sometimes those are a lot easier to place. So it's just so fascinating right now. And while everything is changing so quickly, there's just so many opportunities afoot too.

Brittany: I agree with everything you just said specifically in the way that influencers are being used right now within all industries. And I think that's across the board. And it's more so that authentic experience everyone's kind of chasing. When it comes to the way movies used to do rollouts and the way they do them now, like I think especially like in the peak millennialism of it all, we kind of expect those big activations in which there's a movie premiere and then there's something that fans can go and do, whether it's a photo backdrop or characters or whatever it may be. The most recent one I can think of is when the Smile movie was coming out and they hired a bunch of kind of no-name extra actors to go to baseball games and do creepy smiles behind home plate. And it got a bunch of traction on social media. People were talking about it on local news. And it kind of became more about that at first before people knew what this movie was about. In your opinion and kind of your experience or maybe something that you've witnessed, what are some creative ways indie filmmakers can partner or are partnering with brands and communities to expand reach?

Kelli: I'm going to give you a couple of examples of this. So first of all, I'm rolling out a film in May for one of my clients. It's a horror film. I haven't released the theatrical news yet, but we are planning an activation. So I do think it is really incumbent upon filmmakers to have an activation component to their rollouts, because you want people talking about You want people talking about the film. And I think one thing that filmmakers don't understand is that having made a film, it's not enough. It is not enough to just say, we've made a film, here it is, enjoy it. You've got to have something else to anchor it, whether that's a news peg or an activation. And I always call it the big idea. So I always work with my filmmakers and I'm like, what's the big idea? What can we do? In terms of my own launch at Slamdance, again, I had said that standing in the Sundance shadow is very long and it's very cold. And I knew that I needed to get somebody, I needed to do something to attract people and press to come to my screenings. And I ended up partnering with brands to do gift bags for all of my screenings. And I ended up getting over $60,000 of brand merchandise. So my swag bags were, people were fighting to get them because there was $250 worth of goods in each of these bags. And the VIP $500. I netted something like 30 pieces of press. A lot of them were around, I got a piece in LA Magazine, just solely around the gift bags themselves. I ended up getting the editor for an indie publication to say, if you're not doing your Park City screening like the film Daruma, you're doing it wrong. And all over Park City, I actually had a yoga mat sponsor. So the story about getting those yoga mats up to Park City is internet lore now, the way that happened. So people were talking about the yoga mats as well as the film. And I understand that those things are not connected, but people, I've had people years later come to me and say, I always sell my yoga mat. And they said, I remember riding around on the buses and everybody going like, what is all of this? And people were talking about my film offline. And I didn't get to play at Sundance. I played at Slamdance. One of the filmmakers that I have worked with that has done just a really brilliant job of doing marketing and these activations is the filmmaker Sam Hayes. And Sam Hayes is the director behind Pools, which is out on platforms now. Pools stars Odessa A’zion before she really blew up and was in Marty Supreme. And I forget what else she's done recently, but her star has really taken off. But when Sam was launching Pools, which is a movie about a college kid finding her way through the kind of the doldrums of the summer, going to summer school and figuring out the grief over the loss of her father, it's a really beautiful film. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend looking at it. But Sam's team threw all of these pool parties. They partnered with NeueHouse and they threw pool parties where they did screening parties. And they had great turnout and they ended up netting press in the The Hollywood Reporter that got covered. So I think it's really incumbent upon filmmakers to understand their audiences. What is the big idea that they can bring to their film and their marketing activations? I mean, again, like all of those things worked in tandem. I love the analogy of like, what is marketing? What is PR? And I kind of, can I read this to you guys?

Jenn: Yes, please.

Brittany: Yeah.

Kelli: Okay. So the really good explanation of being like, what is marketing? So if the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign that says the circus is coming, that is advertising. If you put that on the back of an elephant and walk into the town, that's promotion. If the elephant walks to the mayor's flower bed and the local paper writes a story about it, that's publicity. If you get the mayor to laugh about it, that's public relations. And if the citizens go to the circus and you show them all the fun that they're going to have, if they spend money and do the booths and everything, that is sales. And if you plan the whole thing, that's marketing. And that's why my company, my Substack, is called Marketing and PR for Independent Films, because these things work so intrinsically together.

Jenn: Absolutely. I love that. I almost like want to frame that, what you just said and put it in our office.

Brittany: Yeah, I need that stitched on a pillow.

Jenn: Yeah. I mean, because it's so true. This has been incredible. For our last question, just because a lot of our listeners are sort of like new in their careers or budding PR people or budding marketing people. And the film industry and the arts in general are a very popular component. What advice do you have for them? Is there anything like when you had started writing and marketing, Daruma, any advice that you wish you could have given yourself or any advice for just people that have a passion project that want to move forward with it? What would you tell them today?

Kelli: The advice that I would give for people just starting out, I would say, don't wait to be chosen. I waited for so long for someone to pick me and pick the script and pick, you know, pick me, choose me. And it wasn't until I really realized that I had to choose myself and my own projects to get it off the ground and going. And I think that's where a lot of that 17 years went, is that I was knocking on doors and being told no. And I ended up greenlighting myself. So I think that people starting off, whether that's their career in filmmaking or their career in PR, greenlight yourself. Figure out a way to get it made. And understand too that it is okay to fail. It is okay to fail publicly. There's so much opportunity right now and we are living in the craziest time in history. So I want to say that all of the paths that were previously laid before us, a lot of those are broken. I know that a lot of jobs are disappearing because of AI. I know PR is rapidly changing. I know the film landscape is rapidly changing. Nobody has all of the answers and anybody that claims they do probably has a bridge to sell you somewhere, so bet on yourselves. You've got a lot more resources and capabilities than you maybe thought you did.

Jenn: Very well said. And the whole, the great thing about this entire conversation is that so much of what you said applies beyond indie films. Whether you're launching that movie or a brand or a product or a podcast, I think it's fair to say that the same principle holds true. You have to sort of build the audience and build the marketing before you ask for their attention. And I hope our listeners learned just as much today as Brittany and I did. So thank you so much for joining us, Kelli. This was incredible, your insight, your experience, and we're just so thankful that you made the time for us today.

Kelli: Thank you for having me. It was a great conversation.

Jenn: Absolutely.

Brittany: Thank you so much. I learned so much. And I also just want to note, I wish you guys could have seen my face when it was mentioned that Little Miss Sunshine turned 20 years old this year.

Jenn: Oh boy, I know, right? It's one of my favorites. It's one of my favorites. Me too.