Circle Jerking the Snake
I promised a follow-up to the entry I made after Snakes’ (on a Plane, fool) opening day. Here it is. Sorry for the delay, but work and life got in the way.
I don’t want to discuss the movie or its performance as much as I’d like to write a few words about the bloggers who talked it up. Specifically, the bloggers who sang the movie’s praises simply because they saw the Studio’s blogger-outreach as one of the Seven Signs of the Collapse of Marketing As We Know It™ (and, lo, they rejoiced in it). And specifically-specifically, their reaction after things didn’t turn out so well.
The first thing that pops into my mind that didn’t immediately happen within the marketing blogger hype circle was any sort of deep reflection into what Snakes failing to live up to their expectations meant for the school of marketing they preach. I mean, c’mon, Defamer can instantly see and dissect the ramifications (even if half in jest) but the marketing blogger clique can’t?
Now that the value of a year of obsessive, overwhelmingly favorable internet hype buzz has been measured at a disappointing $15.25 million, or roughly the rate of return New Line could have expected if it had placed cartoon images of Samuel L. Jackson hugging pink pythons on the side of a Happy Meal box, the studios will spend this morning dismantling their Why Can’t We Come Up With Our Own Funny Titles Around Which Bloggers Will Construct Loving YouTube Parodies? think-tanks and redistributing the personnel to their Dreaming Up Projects In Which Will Ferrell Can Run Around In Circles, Causing His Swollen, Pale Belly To Jiggle departments. (”Monday Morning Box Office: Snakes On A Bomb“)
Instead of saying, “o.k., our thesis didn’t pan out; what does this mean,” what we saw was the marketing bloggers begin to spin– spin how the opening day box office returns were actually a rousing success. Mack Collier (the other Mack, thank you very much) over at The Viral Garden actually tried to show– using statistics only an Enron accountant could love, and only after taking some time to blast the mainstream media for “turning” on the movie– how Snakes on a Plane performed better at the box office than Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest.
Excuse me?
“But Mack (the ad monkey Simpson one), the only thing that matters is if it makes a profit– not how long it takes to get there.” Sorry, but simply turning a profit after an ever-expanding timeline isn’t a metric that allows Hollywood producers and moneymen to sleep easily at night. Besides, I could shoot Samuel Jackson reading from the pages of a phonebook straight into the camera, release it without any hype of any sort– Internet or otherwise– and it would eventually turn a profit (perhaps even faster than Snakes on a Plane did). If Snakes turns a profit (and I’m sure it eventually will) and the marketing bloggers claim victory, take it with a grain of salt.
“But Mack (yeah, the ad guy again), the momentum will build and it will do even better next weekend.” Oh yeah?
Football season started early as Mark Wahlberg’s “Invincible,” a Walt Disney tale about a real-life walk-on who signed with the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1970s, debuted as the top weekend movie with $17 million. The previous No. 1 flick, New Line Cinema’s “Snakes on a Plane,” lost altitude in its second weekend, falling to sixth place with $6.4 million, a steep 58 percent drop, according to studio estimates Sunday. (CNN)
All the “but… but… buts” do is simply put off the chance to look at what the disappointment means for “new” marketing, and I’m not sure we’ll have that discussion any time soon because so many people have swallowed their own Kool-Aid.
Joe Jaffe, to his credit, says, “I’m not sure I as much predicted it would be a smash as I hoped it would be, based on the exponential validation it would have lended to the still-young and oft misunderstood social media and new marketing worlds.” He then follows that statement up, though, with a series of “but… but… buts.”
Many of the marketing bloggers are way too heavily vested in proving the validity (nay, the superior qualities) of “new” marketing. They’re not marketing bloggers, they’re marketing 2.0 bloggers, and the problem with this is it precludes any sort of honest reflection on what was tried and what went wrong (though you’ll surely hear a lot about the third leg of marketing post mortems: what went right).
Look. I don’t want to see anyone fail, least of all people who work hard and believe in what they’re doing. But I’m also not going to sit here and blow smoke up my own ass trying to make myself believe this medium is more mature– or wields the power that comes from maturity– than it really is, especially when I’m charged with spending other people’s money in the pursuit of results.
The podcasts, RSS feeds and blogs that so engage the daily time and energies of the leading-edge digerati are alien or unknown concepts for most of the U.S. adult population. […] While marketing prognosticators and technophiles rush into the future, raving about the next big content delivery system or ad model, the fact is most Americans — notably adults with steady incomes — still get their content the old-fashioned way. (AdAge)
I’m not saying we shouldn’t embrace new media and new models; we should, absolutely. Experimentation leads to new, better ways of doing things (the creative revolution, anyone?). What I am saying is if you’re going to discuss all that’s right with the new world, be prepared to offer up some honest reflection on all that’s wrong with it when something goes badly.
Or, for god’s sake, if your only purpose it to perpetuate and participate in the blogger circle jerk of hype without offering up anything from the other side of the coin, put a freaking disclaimer up on your site somewhere so you don’t unduly influence a poor junior brand manager into doing something that will cost her her job when it goes south.
26 commentsEmail Article Monday, August 28th, 2006 at 12:17am Mack Simpson
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Technorati Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Snakes on a Plane, Hype
