I just saw an ad on TV for “wireless soup.”
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Some years back, I wrote about my recent visit to Comic Con, the yearly pop culture mega-convention in San Diego. I did some critiquing of it, and “entertainment journalism” as willing accomplices/collaborators of the entertainment industry’s marketing machine. What was most interesting to me at the time is the way that secrecy built hype. You’re a big video game company, you’ve got a new game coming out in a year, but you hide all the details. Which makes all of the fans and “journalists” so hungry for news that they’ll jump at your tiniest leak or press release. This makes good tacticaly sense for marketers, but ends up being pretty insane for the audience.
And today, I’ve just seen the most ridiculous example of parceled-out hype in a while.
A big, new superhero movie called “The Avengers” is going to be released in the spring of 2012. And today, there was much pomp and giddiness for the release of the First Official Trailer. Remember, this isn’t the movie that fans want to see, this is a commercial for the movie. But that wasn’t enough. Yesterday, the television show “Entertainment Tonight” gave us all an “exclusive first look” at the commercial. For those of you who couldn’t wait 12 hours, the TV show showed clips of the commercial for the movie you actually want to see.
And that’s not all! One popular fan site gave readers a “preview” of the Entertainment Tonight segment! So you could watch a preview of the preview of the commerical for the movie.
I understand why the studios do this, and I sometimes get caught up in the spiral myself. Hell, there’s even some logic buried in there for the fans. But, objectively speaking, that doesn’t make it any less nuts.
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What the fuck?
Comment by Anonymous — December 16, 2004 @ 10:50 am
My search is over!!
Comment by Anonymous — December 17, 2004 @ 9:18 am
Okay, I’ll spill. It was a commercial of some alterna-teen getting ready to leave the house. She picked up her cell phone and her pda and her mp3 player, and the announcer said something like “all of your gear is wireless… shouldn’t your soup be?” And the girl opened the microwave and took out a cup of soup designed to be carried around and drunk like a to-go coffee. I’m sure they meant to say “portable”, but portable just isn’t a sexy enough word.
I imagine wired soup was taken off the market decades ago, due to the electrocutions.
Comment by Jake — December 17, 2004 @ 9:46 am