By Reid Rosefelt
Making a great movie is hard. Marketing a movie might be even harder. There are many good movies every year, but there are far fewer well-marketed ones. The list of people (and studios) who market films successfully year after year is a very elite club.
When I began working as a publicist, most American filmmakers weren’t expected to be able to promote his or her own work. Nowadays every filmmaker is expected to be able to shoulder that burden.
How scary this must be for filmmakers.
The death of the indie video store is imminent. At least that’s what everyone tells me. Working as a video store clerk in one of a handful of stores (Queen Video) in Toronto is both a blessing and a burden. While the job remains interesting, I’m continually receiving remarks about how great it is that we’re still open. In the wake of the Blockbuster collapse, the independent video store flourished. Business seemed better than usual around late 2011 when the last Blockbusters were closing down in Canada. At that point in time, Netflix had already arrived, and streaming was still popular, but for some reason many people did not want to let go of the video store experience. 
Strategy is a great personal passion, but something I find few people have an adequate grasp of. While the basic assumption seems to be that advice of all kinds is inherently strategic and of value, it is often anything but. Any given suggestion or piece of advice is only worthwhile inasmuch as it allows the attaining of a goal — without knowing that goal and measuring the success of attempts to attain it, you are not operating strategically: you are merely using tactics of unknown value. 
As I alluded to in a 
