Funding Innovation: How to Fund a Long Term Audience Development Strategy

Complementing individual releases with a long term audience development strategy is a significant but important transition for distributors and film promotion bodies. The usheru solution is designed for this transition powering individual movie pages within a wider framework that accumulates audience data over each release.

However, we recognise that this innovation and investment required is not always straightforward. As in all business, cash flow is critical, particularly in a traditional business cycle still structured around individual release costs and P&A budgets.

How to power a longer term investment within the current parameters of the distribution business model?

Here are some suggestions from our team that have been dealing with these challenges faced by our partners.

1. Several partners asked if the cost of the usheru platform can be spread over a number of months or even attributed to particular release budgets. This is really a straightforward swap: instead of building a new site for each release, the cost for the platform is split over a number of new releases.
2. We have also found that some partners have chosen to build usheru into funding applications. These vary from country to country but have included distribution funds, Post-Covid relief funds and those geared more to innovation.Having successfully secured public funding ourselves on different occasions (e.g. Creative Europe) we recognise the importance these canplay in helping the business take leaps that would otherwise be harder to make.Because of this, we are open to working with companies considering submitting a funding application, to provide advice or guidance on how to include usheru within that particular funding stream.
3. As a company specialised in innovation, we are open to new suggestions from our partners for how to structure the investment over a longer period.

Audience Development for Innovation

In conclusion, usheru is committed to innovating the film marketing model but we recognise that we need to be flexible and responsive to each player’s current needs. We hope that this article has provided ideas and inspiration for how you can effectively make a long term investment in your business.

We are more than happy to explore such models and we view being flexible and open minded about this as an important part of our partnership.