By Robert Dixter Nov 7, 2006, 7:32 GMT
So Borat opens with $26 million and suddenly everyone that was saying online marketing doesn’t work is changing their minds faster than Nicole Richie’s lunch comes up.
A little while ago New Line released a much hyped film called ‘Snakes on a Plane.’
I say much hyped because the online community (and by community I mean they have it all, even the people that go door to door telling you they’re into child porn and have moved into the neighborhood) had been talking about this film for months.
There was so much, what the intelligence community calls “chatter” (the online community plays the intelligence community in an inter-community baseball league) about the film that New Line even started to listen. They changed the film from a PG-13 to an R rated film by adding more violence and language. They added scenes based on online suggestions and they even gave the online community co-director credit (this last item was made up and is still only reserved for weird brothers who direct together like the Wachowski and Mitchell brothers).
With so much free marketing you would think the movie would be a steroid induced homerun. I mean everyone online was talking about the film and the audience for the film was single guys who spent most of their time online or arguing with their mom about what she made for dinner.
Then film opened and disappeared so fast it made Wes Bentley look like he had a career in comparison.
Borat was going along a similar route. There was the Borat My Space page, Sacha Baron Cohen never breaks character while promoting the film, the first four minutes of the film were available on YouTube and the government of Kazakhstan was promoting the hell out of the film by telling everyone how they were insulted by it.
So aside from an actual country backing your film the comparisons between the two campaigns were not much different, except for one big point. Borat is actually a good movie.
It’s funny and clever and keeps you laughing. Snakes on a Plane is a bad b-movie that you would watch at a drive in theater but not really watch because you always intended to make out through the first act anyway and hopefully move to the back seat for the second and third acts if you were lucky.
Creating awareness of a film is a hard thing to do in a time where everybody’s attention is split between broadcast TV, cable TV, internet and Super Mario Kart for the Nintendo DS (it’s a problem and I’m checking into Betty Ford to cure it, and meet celebrities).
But once you make people aware, you still need to have a good product to sell them. Borat does that, Snakes does not.
So where does that leave the online marketing issue?
Well, if you have a decent movie and you want people to see it, come up with creative ways to sell it. Never breaking character is a good one, and if you can get a former Soviet republic to inadvertently sell your film it doesn’t hurt either.
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