There's an Associated Press fluff piece out today about what a sensation the new Indiana Jones trailer is. Sensation? That's news to me. I guess the title- New 'Indiana Jones' Trailer Is Smash Hit- has a grain of truth in it. For 24 hours it was the talk of Nerdville. But then, as it is known to do, the internet moved on to other things (like that superwickedawesome Iron Man trailer). "Smash hit" certainly implies a bigger buzz than that. So I read through the whole article (That's right, the whole thing. Who says my generation has a short attention span?!) looking for evidence to the contrary. But all I found was empty generalizations and a quote from hyperbolic fanboy Harry Knowles. Then I read this bit and had to choke back my righteous indignation-
"Older audiences certainly remember Indy, but that's not the prime ticket-buying demographic. Thus the aggressive online campaign, which included what Paramount says is a record 4.1 million views on the Yahoo movie site in the first week and 2.6 million on the official IndianaJones.com site, the most ever for the studio. "
Sure, those stats sound great for Paramount, but in a world where videos of talking cats pull in the same numbers... well let's just say there's more to enduring quality than can be measured in raw data. I also take issue with the AP's definition of an aggressive online campaign. A few stills and one trailer is aggressive? Bullshit. That's par for the course. The viral campaigns of Cloverfield and Dark Knight, utilizing multiple websites and real world scavenger hunts to encourage an online whisper campaign, that's aggressive. I get the feeling this article was written for all the old ladies and squares who aren't savvy to the kind of media blitzkrieg the internet is capable of. The writer assumes that online trailers are some revolutionary new form of promotion and Lucasfilm is spearheading the movement.
The fact is this article is just an example of the old, tired form of viral marketing. It's nothing more than advertising thinly veiled as news. Let's hope the movie itself has some new tricks up it's sleeve because it's campaign sure doesn't.
2 comments:
But it doesn't need new tricks. The teaser was a good mix of nostalgia ante-chamber stuff and a tease of new footage that does - to almost everyone I've spoken to - have people dying to see more. The viral stuff - it's cute, but it sometimes has to suit a particular film, and often gets annoying. I don't really enjoy sifting through four pages of Joker nonsense in order to find a HD trailer.
I dunno. I agree that the article isn't great and the "aggressive tag" is bullshit, I don't think the fact that it isn't is a bad thing, and I dig that this is all we've had so far because as much as I'm looking forward to IRON MAN I feel like I've seen half of it already. I know you're not interested in INDY, but I think you're using that in a way to discredit in, when in fact, a lot of people do seem genuinely excited.
I don't mean to say it needs the Dark Knight viral treatment either. I meant to blast the AP article's representation of the campaign, not the campaign itself. It's an article designed to build buzz with regular folks who don't follow so many movie sites. It's building buzz on a bullshit premise. It's fooling the normals into thinking the trailer is an internet "smash".
And I was getting a dig in at the old Commercial As News Article style of media promotion that 99% of Hollywood movies utilize.
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