Is film marketing useful?

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Film-marketing, as a part of any International film festival, has these days
become a made phenomenon whether films are sold/ marketed or not.
Film-marketing, at the just concluded 9th Kolkata film festival, is no
departure either. This time the film-marketing section was inaugurated by
Rupa Ganguly, the noted actress and Secretary of Artistes' Forum, headed by
Soumitra Chatterjee, the permanent Chairman of the Forum, and had left a lot
of promise and optimism to be covered. Foreign filmmakers and delegates took
part in it as did the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), West
Bengal Film Development (WBFDC), and Sree Venkatesh Films, producer of
Rituparno Ghosh-directed Choker Bali. Others who took part in the
film-marketing included Surinder Films, Countrymen Film and Net Guru and
sundry other distributors.
But after the festival is over, one needs to take a stock-taking of the
entire process raising the eternal flutter - is film-marketing useful? Well,
while many among film distributors and producers are still hopeful, others
are very dicey and skeptic about its aim and result. Tarun Majumder, the
noted filmmaker, who has sustained the Bengali film industry for many years
with his superhit films, commented, "Definitely every director wants his
film to get a wide market and good business since filmmaking process is very
expensive. These days we hear so much of film-marketing, but we are not sure
to what extent film-marketing brings rewards for the distributors and
producers. Whatever the result, I think, we can no more neglect the issue of
film-marketing, a platform to sell films."
Source:
http://www.screenindia.com/fullstory.php?content_id=6775