A Simple Machine

A Simple Machine, Mark Alan Hoffman’s coming-of-age story about freedom, debt, and a bike, was headed to the Cleveland International Film Festival with a very limited marketing budget. The goal wasn’t to “run some ads” but to make the film an event the local community could rally around.

Instead of marketing broadly, we built a hyper-local campaign around the people most likely to care:

• Cleveland-area indie film lovers
• Film festival attendees and arts audiences
• Cyclists, given the film’s themes
• Locals interested in lifestyle, culture, and alternative ways of living

To make it bigger than a screening, we also promoted a pre-screening community bike ride that brought the film’s spirit into the real world. A Simple Machine became more than a movie: a local happening, a conversation, a shared experience.

On roughly $750 in total ad spend, a highly targeted Meta campaign drove exceptional engagement and turnout:

• Two Cleveland International Film Festival screenings filled
• 3,300+ landing-page clicks
• Reach of about 67,000 highly targeted people in the Cleveland area
• About $0.20 per landing-page click
• Strong local engagement around the pre-screening bike ride

For a niche indie film, that’s remarkable. It shows what many filmmakers underestimate: you don’t need a studio-sized spend to generate attention and ticket demand. You need sharp positioning, great creative, and the right audience strategy.

The campaign combined lean paid media, event-centered community promotion, and performance tracking:

• Meta Ads for hyper-local targeting and ticket-driving campaigns
• Geographic targeting on the Cleveland region
• Interest targeting on indie film, festivals, cycling, and related lifestyles
• Landing-page optimization for click-throughs and conversions
• Ad creative for the screening and the bike ride
• Tracking reach, clicks, click-through rate, and cost efficiency

A Simple Machine shows what indie film marketing can do with precision and imagination: instead of relying on passive festival exposure, a place-based campaign moved people to act.

The lesson for filmmakers: marketing shouldn’t stop at a poster and a trailer. Understand your film’s emotional hooks, cultural overlaps, and local communities, and you can build momentum that fills seats and gives your project a life beyond the screen.