Explaining Perspective

[nfotxn]

I'm not a huge Sci-Fi fan in the sense of owning a giant library of books with fancy airbrushed covers or being able to remember minutia from Isaac Asimov books from the 60s. However I have read some of the necessities and enjoy the genre. Even lament it's death as proof of the anti- or faux-intellectual air one breathes from people quite frequently here in the 21st century. Many people understand science not as the observational discipline that it is but as a plot device for CSI or Tomb Raider. This is not to discredit entertainment, I'm not for austerity and enjoy the campy and profane. In fact in recent years the move away from pseudo-Scientific narrative to adaptations of great Fantasy genre books is a welcome departure. I hope at least, you could also interpret it as people being so totally lost in the fray of magical thinking that only the pseudo-biblical, or entirely magical but anti-biblical in the case of The Golden Compass, makes an impression in light of 9/11 or Darfur or what-have-you. This is a big complex and increasingly aware planet. We're all a bit shell shocked and fucked up these days.

One of my favourite futurists is, like many others, William Gibson. Not because his writing is particularly good, I find the stories meandering and unexciting, but the setting and characters are more savvy than they play in the books. One of the characters from The Bridge Trilogy of books is able to detect patterns in information and is literally susceptible to viral marketing. Which is perhaps over-inflated prosaic hyperbole for the real world where we human beings have these untold and often even unnoticed skills of observation. We autonomously take in immeasurable quantities of information in our day to day life. There is still no iPod or hard drive or super computer that can store all the stimulus anyone is exposed to in their day to day life. From the temperature of the keypad on the security door to the torque required to turn it open. The measurement, change and reaction to the sudden lack of inertia when embarking the train or bus. The marketing message repeated, the marketing message repeated, the marketing message repeated. We know that all these little bits of seemingly meaningless but ubiquitous information are stored in our brains, at least temporarily, and we are reminded of them especially if they are routine or exceedingly out of routine.

The crafty nature of viral marketing is it's mode of dissemination. Like it's namesake it is infectious. Not for the alien and unknown intents of a micro-organism but in fact one that is human and totally, utterly and explicably lame. The marketing message repeats across us for the sole purpose of replication. Our animal savant side notices this, audits it and adds it to the roster of our conscious mind. And at this point, if you are a conscious human being, thanks to the marketing infection of your friends you've now got a for-profit message in your head. "Buy a movie ticket to find out".

In the case of "Cloverfield", much like "The Blair Witch Project" before it and many other films in the past, you have a whole press kit, "leaked" images and culture of unpaid viral marketers unfazed by their determination to buy a ticket to a film that is, for all intents and purposes, a product of indeterminate quality. Furthermore fallacies of fair game are strangely misapplied to this highly profitable game of social media hijack. Which is awfully sporting of people to approach this situation with. However the warning I would wave is that when the product doesn't deliver but the marketing technique does we risk really changing the way we communicate. We already live in a public world plastered with marketing messages. The structure of trusted relationships is now being infected with those messages such that there is, in an unlikely but extreme circumstance, no place to particularly get a trusted opinion.

One might think that just dealing with the hype of your friends is totally innocuous. But as I experienced if you buck the trend and are openly critical of people regarding their subscription not to the premise or quality of a movie but to their intrigue with the marketing of the film, well, you get tribe mentality. Belong or get out. Buy the movie ticket or shut up. You are personally offending me if you are not buying into the marketing I am buying into. Those are the, admittedly paraphrased, impressions I was given.

That's disappointingly unthinking and a touch creepy.

Comments

[bear-with-me.livejournal.com]

I had no idea I had done all that, I thought I was just killing and hour and a half. ;-)

[velnich.livejournal.com]

I think you got the bigger reaction from writing lines like "Are people really dumb enough to take the Blair Witch bait twice?" than you did from making your opinion of the movie clear. One is slightly more offensive to people that may disagree with you than the other.

As for viral marketing... I agree, but only see it as the latest twist in the ongoing battle between the marketer and the consumer. Eventually no less ignorable than most other forms of marketing. Maybe that's just being optimistic though.

[velnich.livejournal.com]

IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE, PEOPLE. GET OVER IT.

That's pretty much the point extremes on both sides should be taking to heart.

[velnich.livejournal.com]

I missed that dramatic gem, but yah, those types on one side and the "on a mission to label the movie 'worst ever'" types on the other.

[dizzi-d.livejournal.com]

I always call it a wash... I figure the people who succumb zealot-like to the marketing balance out the folks who would rebel against the cure for cancer "just because everyone else was doing it" in the end.


Same same. Different different.

[djmrswhite.livejournal.com]

as a member of the press, i am at least partially responsible for creating that hype since i thought that movie was kind of a blast and would enjoy seeing it turned into a sitcom where cloverfield goes to a new city every week and destroys it, eventually battling other monsters and then, ultimately, turning into a friend of children everywhere.

this week, my job is to create hype for "over her dead body," starring eva longoria as a different type of monster

[nfotxn.livejournal.com]

I'm fine with the media whoring out to marketing because at least they're trying to make a buck up front. But lending your personal blog to said shenanigans is a precedent I find many more shades creepier. Social media is less democratic when we sell our opinion for the cachet of having leaked information about something nobody has seen. Even if we say "this may well suck" by mentioning it at all we've lent our voice to a viral cause. And that's all that matters.

[dirtyglamour.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree that viral marketing is very disconcerting. However, I did disagree with your analysis of why people saw the movie. Some may have seen it because of the press kit. Some might have heard it was great from a friend (me)..some people may have seen it because they want a first person perspective monster movie.

What I was annoyed with was your opinion of a movie you've never seen. I mean...if you saw it was a piece of crap...and then wrote about what a piece of crap it was...it would mean alot more.

What I got out of your last post was: "I can't believe you idiots went to see this movie that I haven't gone to see because I'm above viral marketing. Obviously this movie that I haven't seen sucks ass. You're just a cog in the marketing machine if you go see this movie."

I'm sure that wasn't the intent...but its how it was perceived by quite a few people. You could have written it completely differently..like this post. This post = much better.

[nfotxn.livejournal.com]

Yeah I had no real intent here. I thought I'd just write this and explain further where I'm coming from. We're totally still cool and I feel bad having now flame baited followed by some extreme intellectual masturbation here. Somebody called this all "abusive" whereas that implies some sort of intention to hurt. Which I really didn't foresee let alone intend on.

[dirtyglamour.livejournal.com]

Hey man, it's all good. I have totally done stuff like this too. I know you don't go about real life this way either. It's easy to miscommunicate online.

[slumberjack.livejournal.com]

um... i just saw the movie coz i like monsters. i didn't realize there was "viral marketing" until a few days before i saw the movie.

if you want to attack viral marketing and threats to our society, focus on something like Project Runway or Apple!

hehe :-)

[(Anonymous)]

Ditto on the Apple observation. And that's coming from a lifetime Apple fan.

For a marketing parallel, read Seth Godin's Permission Marketing or Unleashing the Ideavirus, which came out shortly after Gibson's trilogy. Then pick up Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool for a 40-year flashback of cultural co-optation. Unthinking has been with us for far, far longer than fansites.

Underwhelming results

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

I think that, after the disappointing returns of the ultra-viral-hyped "Snakes on a Plane" that people are realizing that viral marketing isn't as powerful as they thought - and SoaP went on it's own fuel, the viral marketers got in _after_ the bloggers had pushed its hype machine to 4th gear (unlike Cloverfield that was astroturfed from the start).

The fact is that the blogosphere is a lot smaller than it looks. The Biggest Thing Ever online is still small potatoes in meatspace - look at Howard Dean's career, for example.

On the topic of harder sci-fi, go rent Sunshine. It's not perfect - not by a long shot - but it's still an excellent space film that doesn't rely on hyperdrives, phasers, or magic.

[(Anonymous)]

A 48-year-old postscript, as I was apparently unthinking. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, marketed with lobby cards reading "No one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance of Psycho." Directioublicity kits with explicit instructions to enforce policy with Pinkertons, leading to frenzied word-of-mouth and round-the-block ticket queues.

[(Anonymous)]

Garble. "Directioublicity" should be "Director-designed publicity".

[five0xpres.livejournal.com]

But as I experienced if you buck the trend and are openly critical of people regarding their subscription not to the premise or quality of a movie but to their intrigue with the marketing of the film, well, you get tribe mentality. Belong or get out. Buy the movie ticket or shut up.

Only those who are new here would be surprised to find you bucking popular fads. It's your nature.

I have the same feeling about the viral aspects of Apple's marketing. I mean...who buys an electronic device that requires you to send it to a service center to replace a battery? Oh yeah, it's because the design of the case is to be seamless and a battery door would interrupt the flowing lines? WTF?!?! But I digress.

This is, and always has been your space to vent about whatever, so fuck those who don't get you and keep the commentary coming. I personally find it refreshing in a world of doublespeak and spin control by the talking heads on television or the latest bullet points on some political, social, entertainment blog run by corporations who are out there to court to the sheep. Be a goat Brodie.

[wwabbit.livejournal.com]

"...when the product doesn't deliver but the marketing technique does we risk really changing the way we communicate..."

I've not heard it expressed quite that way, but it is, I think, the same as "the medium is the message" - although phrased in response to a particularly aggressive form of American Capitalism (the sort that uses memes to make money without paying the advertisers). This is like putting "Nike" on your hat or t-shirt. This viral marketing of bad movies is just the next step.

So my question is do we "risk changing" or, in fact, have we changed, already?

[kingfuraday.livejournal.com]

Last Summer I saw a trailer for this movie and it looked nifty. I went to see it and I enjoyed it quite a bit. So much so that I was smiling and laughing when I got home after having had such a good time with it.

I read your post and allowed it to rob some of that joy from me and allowed myself to be angry with you because you insulted people in general who would have a desire to see a movie of this kind.

It was a knee jerk reaction.

You're well read, articulate, and you wear me out... The number of your posts that make my stomach turn out number the number of posts that don't. And yet I read because it's good to know someone who sees the world differently. Your confidence in your opinions and your ability to back those opinions up with the words and theories of others is impressive as well.

Keep it coming.

[nfotxn.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you have that reaction. To be honest I find the reactions to my well considered posts more along the lines if the type of dialogue I want to have and keep with people. I'm not here to make judgement on the posts if others in their blogs. However I do want people to make consideration as to how they're sewing their own electronic media. We have a great opportunity to keep it democratic and I have some pretty valid fears, that I can back up, that all of this will become another ad space where kick-backs from studios and manufacturers colour our views and trusted opinions on things. Imagine if Apple allowed their horde if geeks early access to products or information about them, which they may already be doing with "leaked" information? Just to feel part of the in-crowd people will very quickly colour their opinions of things they haven't even seen or touched.

I mean think of the era we live in the spam murmur smear campaigns bring successful in certain populations in convincing people that Obama is Muslim! In our case, as middle class no kids tech fags, our own messages are used to sell movies and video games and computers. Marketers have been selling laundry detergents with different coloured packages because they know ovulating women react differently and will spend more money for different coloured packages during that-time-of-the-month. And those are studies from the 60s. I have no doubt in my mind that our blogs and social networks are being deciphered right now.

I just want to lend a critical eye.

[grimmlok.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I'm still failing to see the vast difference between "viral marketing" and say.. a "teaser" trailer for any other movie.. or really, ANY promotional material for any film.

The teaser is aptly named.. it teases you with snippets, to jog your interest and yet gives no indication of the quality of the film it is advertising.

The same for a trailer.. it's an edited and constructed blurb designed to appeal (depending on which version you see) to different markets. Action? Romance? Scares? It can be twisted to promote THAT focus should the evil marketing powers that be decide to. None of these give you any more indication of the quality of the film so unless you wait for reviews and meter out a balance of those, you'll never know for sure if what you're paying 8 bucks for is a quality product or not.

Viral marketing is simply a more focused attempt to do what advertising has done for ages, which is foster an opinion and interest in whomever is witnessing it to buy into the product.

*shrug* maybe it's me, I just don't get what all the shirt rending and chest thumping is about. In the end, it's a movie marketed in certain ways along the lines of all the other movies that have come across. Some ad tactics are just better at getting people in seats, and if said tactic is simply a new twist on an old play then.. all advertising that does not inherently display in detail the products plusses and minuses is somehow inherently bad?

Nah.

It's called a hook. That's all.

The reason it's not such a big deal (at least to me) is that said viral marketing in this instance is for a piece of disposable entertainment. It's not an investment of large sums of cash (individually) into a product that you will need, use and care for over long periods of time. It's an ephemeral, disposable time occupier.

[typeractivity.livejournal.com]

I heard somewhere that advertising and marketing comprises 10% of the US economy. It certainly funds some of the things we enjoy on the Internet or TV, so I don't despise most of it as long as it is not intrusive and disrespectful of me and my attention. That fact is, we all have a little bit of the "vapid consumer" in us, and advertising aims to encourage our worst impulses in buying luxuries like $7 movie tickets. Anyhow, I was more than willing to spend my $7 on this film based on the marketing around it, because it reflected a possibly innovative take on the monster movie. Was I disappointed? No. It was good popcorn fun, and utilized its gimmicks to the full tilt. Monster movies are supposed to be gimmicky.