The Avengers, Bad Marketing, And Nerd Culture Promotion
So as you read last column, I was pretty pumped on The Avengers, and analyzed why it worked. However I’m not that hot on the marketing. As noted, I think it helped sow doubts about the film’s quality.
Really the marketing and advertisements were . . . well, rather “meh.” I can’t think of anything that stood out to me as selling me on the film, it was a rather unremarkable set of events and commercials.
In fact both times I went to see “The Avengers” (yes, twice, it’s worth it), there were previews for several films that seemed to pretty much all be the same. So much marketing media all looks alike.
Trailers? It’s the same old thing, with your usual lead-in, heavy beats, big boom, and then a lot of action.
Posters? Yes, they seem alike.
Tie-Ins. All over the place, with the usual lame candies and more. It’s practically a joke.
The end result? Every film looks alike, is marketed alike, and is terribly indistinct. A great movie can get lost in the shuffle because it all looks the same. It’s like video games and the Dull Brown Space Marine Adventure we’ve all come to . . . really make fun of.
It’s all standardized. It almost seems like some of these marketing efforts are just to keep the marketers busy while buzz is built by other methods. Or perhaps its just applying standard approaches because no one has anything else.
This makes it much harder to assess media quality since the same-y marketing buzz merely obscures our ability to asses quality (not that it helped in the first place). It also creates the chance to sabotage something worthy with a mediocre or laughable campaign.
It concerns me in the case of geek/nerd media because if marketing isn’t sure what to do (perhaps because they don’t truly “get” the property), then they may do something stupid. Or they’ll not do something smart.
For those of us working in media, we’ll need to remember this trend.
For those of us not working in media, we can just remain annoyed. I get the impression we’ll be that way for awhile.
