Film marketing involves identifying an audience in order to best bring a movie to the attention of viewers so that they will want to watch it. Promotion refers to the specific ways a movie can be made into an object that audiences will want to see.

The most common marketing and promotional strategy involves having one or two well-known actors serve as spokespeople or advertising vehicles for a film. Other promotional strategies include using tie-ins, emphasizing the realism of a film (promising a true-to-life story), or focusing on the technical innovation in the film’s special effects.

Older films in current release, independent films, and foreign-language films typically have less access to commercial marketing and promotion strategies. They typically rely on cultural promotion and social media have afforded new opportunities to spread the word to specialized audiences.

Advertising is a central form of promotion that uses such means as television, billboards, theatrical trailers, print ads and banners on Web sites to bring a film to the attention of a potential audience.

Media convergence, or the coordinating and merging of media outlets such as print, television, and the Internet, is often used today to form a coherent advertising strategy that reaches multiple platforms. For example, a viewer might find and play an online game set in the film’s fictional world on the film’s Web site, read a print ad, and watch an online promotion with the film’s stars all before attending the movie in a theater. One aspect of media convergence is viral marketing, any process of advertising that relies on existing social networks such as word of mouth, Internet links, or networks organized by sites like Facebook or Twitter to spread the word about a new release.

High-concept promotion uses a short phrase that sums up a film by highlighting its main marketable features through its stars, genre, or other identifiable connections. Especially from the 1930s into the 1960s, main-attraction films with well-known stars and big budgets were referred to as a pictures, while B pictures played prior to the main attraction and had lower budgets, featured lower-tier actors, and often displayed less cinematic sophistication. Today, the term blockbuster usually indicates big budgets, action scenes, big movie stars, and special effects, while the term art film generally indicates a slower-paced narrative and a more visually and intellectually challenging film.

Rating systems provide viewers with guidelines for movies (usually based on their violent or sexual content) and are also an important form of advertising.

Word of mouth and fan engagement – like fanzines, Internet blogs, fan fiction, and chat rooms – are the primary ways that information about, and enthusiasm for, a movie is exchanged and spread among potential viewers.