The Purpose Of A Trailer

Advertising an event - Coronation street celebrated there 50th anniversary event with the tram crash and used a trailer.

To advertise the soap to audiences - So that current viewers know what's going on in the soap and if anything new is happening.

Characters and Storyline - If there is a specific storyline about one of the characters it can be advertised in the trailer.

Special episode - Christmas trailers for the soaps are usually shown every year for a special episode, (Eastenders when Archie is killed).

Feed information - If anything new is happening in the soap or if the time it's shown or channel is different they might use a trailer.

Introduce a new storyline - If an exciting new storyline is coming up, they will want to do a trailer so it can show the audience whats happening.

Attract more viewers - The soap could do a trailer to attract more viewers as the want the biggest audience as possible.

Sneak peak - To give the audience a sneak peak of whats about to happen in the soap so they want to watch more!

Some trailers take actually parts from the episode to give a sneak preview on what is about appear, this lets the audience know what will or is about to happen and gives them a guideline on the episode, they want to try and hook their target audience or even a new audience into watching the soap. You can see from this Eastenders trailer they have used parts of the episode and pieced them together into a trailer to give the audience a sneak peak at whats going to happen in this special episode.


Other trailers will create there own scenario stepping away form taken clips form the soap and just create there own. This still tells us the storyline but by not using the footage it will give the audience more of a hook to the soap because it creates more suspense, also it still tells you what the soap is going to contain but they just do it in a complete different format. This clip shoes Kat and Alfie arriving back to the square now you can tell this by the trailer so it does tell us the exact information but they have chosen to do a rather "western" setting and they have stepped away from using any footage from the episode.