Success Plan
Dawson's is a British film sales agency. We take independent feature films to the international market — and we run the validation, testing and marketing work that makes the sale possible before it happens.
Everything runs through a fourteen-step sequence, in four stages. You can run the steps yourself with the Blueprint, or have us run each stage. Either way, it is the same fourteen steps in the same order.
Stage one
Validation
Genre, audience and buyers — established and tested before the money is committed.
Steps one to six of the method, run for your film by us. Six steps. Each one produces a result: validated, or changed — and either way you learn something while it is still cheap to act on. Three weeks, start to finish.
Most producers define the audience by instinct and approach buyers they have heard of. The result is a film that reaches the market with no evidence behind it. Validation is the work that stops that from happening while there is still a budget line to pay for it.
What you get
A genre statement and comp table. An audience definition with the test results behind it. A tiered buyer list of thirty to sixty named companies, with the specification column complete — what each one buys and what it would need your film to be. A response log from twelve to fifteen approached buyers. A written recommendation on what to do next, including, where that is the answer, not making the film in its current form.
Stage two
Producing
Make the film you validated, not the film that emerges.
Step seven of the method. It runs for as long as your production does. Every film drifts. Genre softens in the edit. The audience quietly gets older. A casting compromise moves the buyer list. The runtime creeps past what your Tier A companies can programme. No one of these is a bad decision on its own. Together they produce a film that no longer matches the evidence you gathered in stage one.
The guardrail holds the film to the specification that validation produced.
What it involves
A locked one-page brief covering genre, audience, buyer specification, runtime band and positioning — drawn from steps one to six, and given to everyone in a decision-making role. Change control on any decision that moves genre, audience or buyer specification. The delivery specification kept visible from day one, because deliverables kill more independent deals than reviews do.
Stage three
Audience testing and film marketing
The film tested with a real audience. The campaign built from what they said.
Steps eight to thirteen: recruited test screenings, press and industry screenings, and the full marketing build. Testing first, because a campaign built on a guess about the audience is a guess. Then the materials — positioning, title, key art, trailer cuts — because a trailer is a different product from the film and has a different job. The materials are tested too.
Audience testing
Recruited audiences matched to the film's actual target market — not industry professionals, not friends, but the people a distributor will eventually sell to. We measure the two scores buyers ask about before they make an offer: the percentage rating the film Excellent, and the percentage who would Definitely recommend it. A written report with scores, verbatim responses and recommendations on what to act on.
Audience testing in full →Film marketing
Positioning, title, key art, trailer cuts, sales materials, trade coverage, festival strategy and the campaign that surrounds the release. Distributors want what other people already want — a film with momentum is a different negotiation from a film nobody has heard of. Marketing done before the sale is not presentation. It is price.
Film marketing in full →Stage four
Sales representation
Territory-by-territory licensing to distributors, broadcasters and streaming platforms.
Step fourteen: taking the film to market. Market attendance and screenings, negotiation, contracting, delivery specification management and collection. We operate on a deliberately short slate so that every film gets the full scope of what a sales agency can do rather than a fraction of the attention.
Commission runs at 15–25%, from the first dollar of receipts. The stage four engagement fee covers market costs, materials and the campaign — so the commission is not carrying costs that should be accounted for separately.
What representation covers
Market attendance at the major international film markets. Territory-by-territory negotiation with named buyers. Sales agreement review. Delivery specification management — deliverables kill more deals than reviews do, and they do it after the deal is signed, when the money is already spent. Account collection and recoupment statements.
Outside the ladder
Consulting
Sometimes you don't need an agent. You need a straight answer.
Consulting sits outside the four stages. It is for producers who want an honest read on a situation rather than a process. Is the film ready to go out? What is it worth? Which agents should you approach, and how? Is this agreement reasonable? What do you do when nothing is biting? How do you market this?
A full day on your project, with a short written follow-up so you have something to act on rather than a memory of a conversation. We tell you whether we can actually help before you pay. If we cannot, we say so and we do not charge you.
The method
The fourteen steps are published in full. You can read every one of them before you spend anything. You can also run them yourself — with the Blueprint, a thirty-one-page document, Free, that walks through each step in the order you run it. If you want it applied to your own film, a discovery call is $50, and paying for one takes $500 off Stage one.