Movie marketing has taken a turn toward the extreme
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By MELISSA OLSON
Friday, July 6, 2007 12:30 PM CDT
Special to the Herald
I think movie marketing has gotten a wee bit out of hand.
To be fair, I should note that it’s getting harder and harder to get through to potential moviegoers these days. With the ever-growing power of TiVo, viewers can now fast-forward through TV spots.
More and more people are Netflix’ing and renting movies instead of going to the theater. And the reviews for great big summer movies are often pretty disdainful. So if you’re trying to market a movie, how do you get people to listen?
The answer, it seems, is to get creative. This summer alone, “Knocked Up” hosted preview screenings all over the country, in an effort to really boost word-of-mouth recommendations for the film. Bruce Willis went on one of Geekdom’s charter Web sites, Ain’t it Cool News, for a live chat with viewers about “Live Free or Die Hard.” (In fact, when one skeptic refused to believe it was the real Bruce, Willis called him at home.)
Meanwhile, “The Transformers” have rolled out a media blitz, complete with product placement from car and truck manufacturers, an online partnership with Pepsi to win prizes in a massive lottery, and a whole new line of toys appearing at your local toy store.
But the big creativity winner has got to be the folks behind the Simpsons movie. Not only are a dozen 7-Eleven stores temporarily turning into Kwik-E-Mart, complete with products from the show, but the studio is actually running a contest with 16 of the nation’s towns named Springfield.
Fans can go online and vote as to which town deserves to play the fictional Springfield, and host the film’s premiere. The scheme has gotten plenty of press, especially when one Minnesota Springfield declined to participate. It seems they didn’t want to be associated with a fictitious town sporting a nuclear power plant, an idiotic police force, a rich evil dictator, and more than one alien invasion.
These ideas about marketing — product placement, word-of-mouth buzz, using the Internet, contests and games, etc. — have been around for years, but it seems like they’re growing and changing even more than Optimus Prime’s chest cavity.
What happens when we all get bored with the current scheme? How long before “Transformers” director Michael Bay starts going door-to-door selling tickets, Girl Scout-style?
I have to admit, I’m not immune: my friend Brian and I have been chugging diet Mountain Dew all summer, saving our bottle caps and entering the online lottery. I went online and checked, and I’ve actually entered about 30 different codes, which means in the last month and a half, I’ve consumed at least 30 20-oz bottles of diet Mountain Dew.
Because of the Transformers and their seductive prize packages, I have now grown fully addicted to caffeine, complete with withdrawal symptoms and workday hyperactivity. I’m starting to think this promotion can only be the work of Megatron.
It’s probably much too late to reverse this process — I expect that from here on out, this creative marketing stuff is just going to get bigger. And, you know, it’s not all bad — the Simpsons promotions have provided me with many minutes of online entertainment, and I got to go to an advanced screening of “Knocked Up” and provide my own word-of-mouth review.
And I have to say, headaches aside, the Mountain Dew has probably increased my workday productivity, albeit only for brief, over-caffeinated intervals.
But I do think it’s important for us to take note of just how much we’re being manipulated. This kind of creative advertising is getting more and more seamless, to the point where I no longer think it’s strange that my Doritos bag is covered with “Pirates of the Caribbean” characters. It’s fine to have these promotions, even to participate, as long as we remember what they’re actually about: movies.
And as long as we’re careful to not to mistake quality of advertising for quality of filmmaking. Anyone can come up with elaborate, exciting schemes to market a movie. But a great promotion and a great movie are not the same thing. At least, that’s what I tell myself every time I go to Kwik-E-Mart.
Melissa Olson was born and raised in Chippewa Falls. She graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in film and television, and works for a television production company in Madison. E-mail comments and questions to Melissa at mfo.usc@gmail.com.
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