How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I think the combination of having a trailer and film poster is very important and makes the film a lot more recognisable. If you can then work your way onto a magazine cover of a top film magazine this helps the brand of your film even more.
The advantages of having a poster are simple. If you have a top name star that you know will help the film sell then its something you can make a key part of the poster, whether this be a large name title or a picture either would attract the audience of that star. Because posters are brought out for every single film you want to try and make your poster stand out from the rest. You have a canvas size of typically 30" x 40" to work with.What we haven't done with our own trailer but a lot of films do is bring out a teaser poster. The purpose of this would be to create a buzz early on and whet the audiences appetite by feeding them little bits of information early. A great place to put these are in cinemas. You will already be hitting cinema goers and creating other advertising texts including cardboard standees of a main character, banners, window clings or just mini A4 sized posters.
Because we have quite a good trailer the poster of the film could be as equally strong. In my particular case my film trailer and poster are quite different so at first glance might not be recognisable as a sole brand. But the title 'Torment' is very clear in both and has a good name which is easy to say and easy to remember.
With my poster I decided to go with a theme of darkness by having an eye iris over the picture of the moon. The other colours are quite strong and because they look quite different to conventional horror trailer posters, this is because the greens and oranges change the complexion of the poster. Usually with posters you get blacks, whites and dark reds to indicate blood and danger etc.

The tagline for the film poster isn't used in our actual film trailer but it asks another question which I want to tempt people into watching the film.
The main point of of the poster is to really bring the audience face to face with the beast but not give away why its doing what its doing. I wanted to keep as much hidden as possible so that you wouldn't be able to find anything about it within the poster.
When I look at the colour schemes of both the magazine and the poster I would have preferred them to have similar colours to give them a stronger link. If I were to see the film something that encourages me to see it in the first place would be to see it around the world of the media. The fonts are also different on both as are the taglines. On reflection I would have much rather seen them all the same. This would make other distribution methods much easier to undertake. It looks as if I have 2 brands working side by side which could work for mass marketing but in the long term of release it wouldn't really work.

A key advantage of getting on the front of a magazine is the audience you're managing to hit. A film magazine isn't aimed at a particular age range. Although its aimed at mostly film fans, the fact that it can span from the ages of 12 to 100 would mean that you have access to sell it across the board. By seeing and reading the magazine a spread of word of mouth would rapidly increase, not to mention the shear shelf value that it has. People will see the film on the cover much like advertising space anywhere. It works in the same way as a billboard and you may pass it in the car and just have a glance at it but it would stay in your head.

Distributors have many different ways of selling a film pre release and during the first few weeks of it being in cinema's.
Whether it be via:
Previews
Merchandise (Games, Clothing, Stationary etc)
Adverts
Posters
Magazines
Press Meetings
Festivals
All do a job of getting the film out there, a way in which I think could be utilised more is a viral marketing campaign. If we were to really push a film out I'd do it virally. I have a some knowledge on how things like YouTube work as I'm a keen video marker myself and know how you can get a promotional campaign working well because of a prominence of the internet in recent years within most people having access to the online world. You can create a main website for the film then work off that getting internet advertising space on sites like Youtube Flickr Yahoo and MSN which would target it over a billion people each month.