How a Nollywood Film Gets Made: Here's what a marketer does

After Elevator Baby was released, Iremhen Ilozobhie couldn't contain himself. On X (formerly Twitter) he was in beast mode, promoting the film he had watched and loved.

So Niyi Akinmolayan, one of the film's producers, reached out and asked if he would join his production company, Anthill Studios, as a social media manager. He accepted.

Later, Akinmolayan asked him what he needed to lead the marketing team at the studio. Ilozobhie found a graphic designer, and a communication manager and began to fire on multiple cylinders, spearheading the marketing for everything from Hey You to Ajakaju: Beast of Two Worlds.

The making of a Nollywood film happens in stages, and marketers have the important work of connecting the product with the audience. Ilozobhie, who’s now left Anthill, told Pulse Nigeria about how that magic happens.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Who's a marketer in Nollywood?

A marketer is somebody who thinks about the whole process of getting the movie to sell right.

Who do you typically work with?

The graphics designers, communication managers, photographers and I oversee everything. At Anthill Studios we have all the departments including VFX, so I always lean on them when I need to.

How does one successfully market a film in Nollywood?

Nollywood is very star-driven. If you look at the movies that have made the numbers in recent years, they're movies that are star-driven. The marketing is done by the executive producer who's also the lead actor. They drive the marketing on their own platform.

Marketing plans should be collaborative with the actor so the person isn't just posting every day. If the actor is not the executive producer, they give you a limit of posts they can make because many actors like to pattern their social media page in a certain way.

Where does your job start?

I typically read the script, get information about the actors, and speak to the producer. The first thing I think about even before shooting starts is the poster. I always go on set because of the actor's schedule. I always try to have the poster on set and not after.

I present the executives with a selection of posters, but the executive producers make the final decisions. Sometimes they tell you exactly what they want.

At Anthill Studios, I was also the Head of Behind the Scenes (BTS) on set, because you need content from behind the scenes to market a movie. Pictures and clips of BTS are always useful for marketing. But the real work starts after the shooting ends.

What happens at that point?

You need to start editing the content you took on set and finetune your plan. For The House of Secrets which went to Prime Video, I shot every BTS in black and white and when we released it, it picked up the marketing for the movie immediately. People assumed the entire movie was black and white and that generated buzz.

How do you decide the concept for the marketing?

Most times, it's working with the theme of the movie. It has to be driven by the movie and you can’t repeat the same campaign for two different films. The campaign for a romantic comedy can’t be used for an epic drama. For Hey You, I knew it was a sexual movie so everything we put out had to be 18 plus, even down to the premiere.

We started planning weeks before the premiere in the studio and showed the event planners parts of the movie and started going back and forth. We knew we wanted strippers on the red carpet.

I always go to the location in the morning to watch as they set up. That was when I decided we should make the premiere faster and have an after-party. I also decided to not have the strippers on the red carpet and kept them for the after-party.

Till today, people still text me about the Hey You after-party. We made it like a club and strippers welcomed guests with shots. The premiere was so good and it did the work.

Sometimes we have a meet and greet after the premiere. For Ajakaju: Beast of Two Worlds, when we had Bobrisky at Ikeja City Mall, they had to add two additional showtimes for just that day. Six showtimes that day were completely sold out.

Do you pay the stars for the meet and greet?

We don't pay them but we compensate them. Even if they don't ask you, courtesy demands that you compensate people. Even with actors, you should compensate them when they come for a meet and greet.

How do you shape your mood board?

The thought process behind the mood board is that it's either a hit or a miss. I always have like 15 marketing plans on my mood board but we might just execute 11. And sometimes maybe just five ideas will go viral. Marketing in Nollywood is a gamble but a lovely gamble.

For Mikolo, we overshot our budget. We spent like ₦100 million for jingles for radio, TV, and gift parks across cinemas for every cinema across the country. There was a lot. We did a lot of speakers and billboards. It did very well on Prime Video.

What would you say is a bad campaign?

There's no bad marketing campaign because you can’t predict what will be a hit or a miss. One thing I'll never do is the dancing on TikTok and Instagram Reel thing. I don't think dancing on TikTok actually helps a movie sell.

If you see a campaign working, if you do your research, there have been three or four that flopped. But no one remembers them.

Sometimes the marketing content might not entice the entire audience, but there are people who want to see, for instance, the person who made the animation in a film talking about it. There's no wasted content. There’s just content that didn’t blow up.

How important is the actor to the marketing of a film?

I tie a lot of content around actors because the people we're trying to sell the movie to only respond well to the actors. Nollywood hasn't gotten to a place where you can fully market a movie without the actors. The audience is still based on their favourite.

In Nollywood, only a few studios are not star-driven and sometimes it's hard to break through. How do you want to compete with a Funke Akindele who has 16 million Instagram followers? That's a brand that has a face to it. There's a cult. Funke can decide to use the character Jenifa to market any movie she wants.

But with the studios, you will spend a lot more money. Until the Nollywood audience gets to the point where companies can stand on their own and market their movie, we will need the actors to push the movie for us.

How do you decide the marketing budget for a film?

From being in a movie set, I can estimate the cost of the production. That will put a cap on what my marketing budget can be. It doesn't make sense to use ₦80 million to shoot a movie and you want to spend ₦150 million on marketing. A good number would be a movie made with ₦100 million and the marketing budget varies between ₦30 to ₦50 million. It didn't use to be like this, but billboard prices are now crazy. You have to pay for the distribution of the movie, premiere, media day, and paid PR content.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to become a marketer in Nollywood?

Forget everything you've learnt about marketing. Don't bring that into Nollywood. Nollywood doesn’t provide the time to research for a month. You need to be ready to think on your feet. You have to love marketing to do it in Nollywood. If you're working with say, Coca-Cola, forget what you learned there because the products are just so different.

How much should a marketer in Nollywood expect to earn?

For salary, it really depends on the company, maybe ₦150,000 to ₦400,000 (per month). For freelance, honestly, it depends on the budget the producers have.