What makes a good movie trailer, anyway?

There’s no question that the single most influential piece of movie marketing is the trailer.

At least, that’s according to sisters Monica and Evelyn Brady, co-founders of the Golden Trailer Awards, which recognize excellence in film and TV trailers. Now in its 25th year, the awards have honored ads for projects ranging from action-packed blockbusters like Deadpool & Wolverine to Oscar-winning documentaries like 20 Days in Mariupol.

The Brady sisters founded the awards after graduating film school in 1999, when they were in need of a trailer editor for their own film and found that the people who worked on trailers weren’t credited anywhere easily recognizable. In the years since, the Golden Trailer Awards have ballooned from 19 categories to 108, and the Bradys have had plenty of experience homing in on what makes a movie trailer effective, especially as the trailer-making industry has gained more respect from both fans and professionals alike.

“When you go to an art museum, you can’t really picture what Monet’s face looks like,” Evelyn told Marketing Brew. “When you’re watching a trailer, it’s the same thing. You can appreciate the art. You don’t have to see the individual.”

Time is money

The Golden Trailer Awards recognize not only the excellence that goes into making trailers, but also the breadth of talent in the broader movie and TV marketing space. Though the original 19 categories are the ones that get honored on stage at a live show at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles in May, the number of categories has expanded in an effort to properly reward the intricacies of different types of trailers. New categories have brought in recognition for streaming series, video games, and campy movies—which gets the cheeky Trashiest Trailer award. (This year, the horror film 28 Years Later took home the top prize, while Severance, Wicked, and Sinners all won multiple accolades.)

“There’s different types of movies out there. It’s not all gloss,” Monica said.

Benedict Coulter, co-founder of the motion picture advertising company Rebel, has worked in the trailer-editing industry for decades, and he said that while working on blockbuster movies pays the bills, it’s the smaller films that get his trailer editors the most excited.

“Every time we gather small independent movies, the editors are just like, ‘Oh, I love this,’ because you can kind of explore artistically a little differently,” Coulter told Marketing Brew. “You’re not trying to sell the bombastic presentation. You can go a little more into storytelling and artistic exploration.”

Regardless of the type of movie or TV project, the Brady sisters recognize that there are a few guidelines that generally make a trailer stand out for awards voters while also getting butts in theater seats. These include both technical aspects, like optimal lengths, and psychological tactics, like an emotional hook.

Over the years, though, some of these trailer elements have changed, and Monica told us that trailers today start to feel long after the two-minute mark—a far cry from trailers of yore.

“Everybody has short attention spans these days,” she said. “If you go back as a viewer and watch a trailer from the ’70s, where they’re, like, seven minutes long, I’m crawling out of my skin.”

While traditional TV advertising has kept shorter trailers in vogue, digital advertising has allowed some trailers to run longer, which Monica said is ultimately in service to the fans.

“Because of the internet, you can see different movie marketing at all different lengths. You can have the people who just want a little bite…then you have people who want to go deeper,” she said.

Trailer tricks

When a moviegoer sits down in a theater, the trailers before their feature of choice are chock-full of editing choices that may determine whether they make a return trip to see those other films.

“You have the dialogue, you have the graphics, and you have the music that are all making anchors for a future purchase date, or a future date for you to go out and enjoy yourself again,” Monica said. “It’s the No. 1 thing driving people to the theater.”

When making trailers, Coulter said editors tend to balance techniques that have been proven to work and what might surprise an audience. While an editor might want to try something new and exciting, trailers go through multiple rounds of approval processes and audience tests to have the best chance at selling tickets, which ultimately takes precedence, he said.

But when an editor does something unexpected, it can be worth the risk.

“For people who actually go to the theater, if there’s seven trailers that have used the [same] formula…but there’s one that’s really unconventional and went completely against the grain, that’s the one you remember,” Coulter said. “And if that’s the one you remember, then we’ve done our job, because you’re talking about the trailer, and then you’re talking about the movie.”

For Evelyn, music is what makes a trailer stand out. She’s noticed that modern trailers tend to use current hits, which she supposes could be due to quicker licensing processes.

“That auditory recall for a consumer is so important,” she said. “If I am humming that trailer for the rest of the day, for the rest of the week, that is marketing gold.”

Coulter agreed that music sets the tone for an effective trailer. He credits producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whom he’s worked with on films like the original Top Gun, for teaching him the importance of the first three notes of a song, which he said is key to catching and keeping an audience’s attention.

“Music will separate you,” Coulter said. Out of the dozens of trailers that could be made for a film (often by multiple different agencies), only one will get selected as the final one, which he said could come down to the head of marketing or director having a song preference.

At its core, the trailer is meant to provide “the ultimate hook,” according to Evelyn, but the top priority should also be to not give too much away. It’s a common critique among some movie enthusiasts, who often complain that the joy of seeing a movie is diminished when the trailer reveals the entire storyline.

But such a choice is not always the trailer maker’s fault.

“If you could give everything away in two and a half minutes, there probably wasn’t that much there to see in the first place,” Evelyn said.