Can Someone Explain Word Of Mouth Marketing To Hollywood?
from the might-help dept
Seriously. Is it really that hard for the folks in Hollywood to understand the benefit of word of mouth marketing? After all, this is the same crew of people who know how to blame bad word of mouth when it makes a bad movie tank. You'd think they would recognize the other side of the coin as well. Instead, they do what they always do and send out the lawyers. Here are two new examples: John has submitted the story of Paramount Pictures and TheMovieBlog. Apparently the folks at the blog have been endlessly hyping up and freely promoting the new Transformers movie. Someone at Paramount contacted the blog writer, asking him to remove a certain image from the movie, which he did. Apparently, that wasn't good enough. They then went to his hosting company and had the entire site shut down for another photo he had of a candid photo of some of the actors standing off camera (not a scene in the movie). It's not even clear that there's a copyright violation here, and yet they filed a standard takedown notice without (1) bothering to contact him (2) seeing if there was a real violation or (3) recognizing that he was helping them in promoting the film. Nice work. A similar move concerns the creator of Ren & Stimpy, who has apparently been posting short clips of classic Bugs Bunny cartoons on YouTube to get more people interested in animation. Warner Brothers, who owns the rights, has gone after YouTube for allowing these clips (again, not full videos). Warner's lawyers, obviously, see this solely as defending their rights -- but they're missing out on the the bigger picture. This is helping to promote their old works which are rarely seen any more -- at no cost to Warner Brothers. Not only does it help build up a market of people who might buy future products based on these works, but it also gets more people interested in animation and other Warner products. However, rather than recognizing the value that these fans provide in helping to promote creative works, the studios send out the lawyers. For all the whining and complaining out of Hollywood about how much damage file sharing is doing to their industry, it seems pretty clear that they're doing a lot more damage themselves in their short-sighted focus on legal attack dogs instead of any sense of long term strategy.
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The lawyers they have don't have anything else to do but Hunt down these criminals.
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Hollywood, much like the music industry, is simply not known for taking the more difficult path. It's too bad. They're headed toward the same fate.
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Lawyers vs. Marketing
Laywers are paid to do what they are doing, and I'm pretty sure they didn't consult the marketing department to know what they think about having videos on YouTube or bloggers posting pics of a movie.
This reminds me of an old story of Sun Microsystems circa 1999 suing a company, while a Sun salesman was trying to close a deal. Fast forward 6 years later and look at Sun stocks, vision, leadership... all sunk.
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hollywood understands
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We're the chumps
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duh
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You guys should make a seminar
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Money paid to Actors
Granted, Bruce Campbell isn't a mega-star, but ...
I was going to take an opposing viewpoint, but I can't on this one. Yeah. Stars are paid to much.
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Re: Money paid to Actors
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word of mouth advertising
whether it will have negative or positive impact, we'll have to see...
personally, any awareness is good for business...
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Darn
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finally!
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Re: finally!
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Copyright has rules, folks
True, losing the copyright would mean no more vapid, Gen-X, "edgy" remakes of Bugs Bunny and Co., but Lord knows I don't want -that- to happen...
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Re: Copyright has rules, folks
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Re: Re: Copyright has rules, folks
This way the copyright holder keeps good face, and is still able to defend their copyrighted material in the future.
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Morons
Its stupid crackheads running the country ladies and gentlemen, sensible people like you and I just don't care enough to try to make it to the top, because if we did, the world would explode because we actually have a brain in our head, you see the movies, when someone with a head on their shoulders gets somewhere important, bad things happen... xD
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they don't get it -- and won't because it would vi
see it's like this: by thinking about their crapola, we violate their first law of what Good Consumer should be:
...you'll obey me while i lead you and eat the garbage that i feed you, don't go for help, no one will heed you. your mind has been totally controlled, it has been stuffed into my mold and you will do as you are told until the rights to you are sold...
you see, having an opinion about something violates their idea that you are a Cash Cow to be milked at will.
and since we're all supposed to be good little cash cows and just fork over our money for their dreck, don't forget to "mooo" when you get milked.
dennis
(god, I so miss FZ. he was a great man.)
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solution?
how about having a 'license' for this sort of thing? short clips etc. yes you have to *ask* for it, stating what you want to do etc. they grant the license (free, since its for non-commercial usage and they get some advertising off it), maybe requiring the image to be a link to one of thier pages.
everybody wins.
now they have *defended* their trademark since the usage is licensed right? ok its not perfect but then what is?
or just have a range of promo clips & stills licensed for non-commercial use as a free download (or a link to a remote image/file) for bloggers to use.
its free advertising, well for a good product. and if you allow the hosting on the media compaines servers (i'e you can linkto an image, but cannot host a local copy) if the pr gets bad, pull the links...
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Blinders
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Control
They will spend billions on lawsuits to protect the established business model and leave us with an eviscerated, cable tv like iinternet.
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While one could site Fair Use guidelines, it boils down to two things. First, the respective copyright holders are allowed to decide how their properties are disseminated. Second, those posting copyrighted material, and images taken from the movie whether photographed by studio employees or not are still arguably the property of the studios. Secondly, it's all a matter of being able to afford to engage in a lawsuit if the respective copyright holders decide they don't see the Fair Use Doctrine the same way you do.
John K. had some noble intentions when he put up clips of Bugs Bunny cartoons, wrote about how great the animation was, and even linked several sites where one can purchase the DVDs. The problem is, he likely didn't pay a licensing fee to do show that footage. Seems like he made no arrangements through Warner Bros. to put up clips for the reason being argued. You can bet that shows like Ebert and Roeper make sure they have clearance to show clips of movies they review. John K. isn't a licensed vendor that made arrangements to show this material as part of a promotion with Warner Bros.
The guys running that movie blog site had to know they were running a risk putting up images not acquired directly through Paramount. While they meant well by promoting the movie, they were in no way entitled to publish any images taken from the set of the movie without permission.
Shutting the movie blog site down as a result of an errant picture being posted is overkill. Especially if they made an honest effort to take down the image when contacted by Paramount.
However, to argue that people should be able to post material, even if samples and not for profit, despite the wishes of the respective copyright-holders, demonstrates an overly developed sense of entitlement. In this case, we're talking about Warner Bros' and Paramount's material, not John K's, not the Movie Blog's, not mine, or yours. As such, they get the final say in how their material is handled.
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Says you. The rest of the world may not agree with your interpretation of reality. I say that intellectual property does not deserve legal protection. It should be protected only through the initiatives make through free agreements.
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