Stupid question

AdAge headlines “What We Can Learn from the ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ Fiasco’”

My answer: That city officials often don’t have the cultural awareness of the average public-school student and like to over-react to things they don’t know about.

Quick Takes: 2/14/07

• Deep Focus’ Eric Druckenmiller tackles the issue of appealing to a young audience that is building its own buzz and creating its own spheres of influence.
• A scanning company has created technology that embeds video within a poster sheet to create a fully-animated movie poster.
• New Line is apparently pestering people with emails about things in the world involving the number 23 in anticipation for The Number 23.
• The Little Miss Sunshine creative team is going mobile for their next effort, creating a series of mobile-friendly webisodes.
• McFarlane Toys will be creating a line of figures that tie in to the Simpsons movie.
• Netflix is producing and distributing a new documentary about Tony Bennett.
• The Madman comic and potential movie are both getting a lot of hype from creator Mike Allred.
• CK has a new round of the book discussion club going on, this time with Al and Laura Ries. If you don’t know who those people are you’re obviously not in advertising or marketing.
• Visual search engine Pixsy is creating a site devoted to this year’s Oscar nominees. The site creates these sorts of sites as proof of concept examples of the kind of vertical-themed sites it can do for marketers.
• The complete convergence of movie and video game is getting closer with Ubisoft’s announcement of a new unit to create short films. Those films will at first simply be promotional spots but that will likely change shortly.
• Blockbuster has a list of the top rentals among Oscar nominated flicks.

Valentine’s Day e-cards from Disney and Paramount

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, both Disney and Paramount have created e-cards you can send your loved one that double as promotions for upcoming movies. Disney has Meet the Robinsons-themed greetings (of which John has screenshots) and Paramount has, oddly, created e-cards for Blake Snake Moan.

Why can’t I watch Little Children?

I really, really want to watch Little Children. Why can’t I?

This is the same question I could ask about The Queen, Children of Men or Pan’s Labyrinth among countless others. They look like quality movies and I’ve actually already added them to my Netflix queue, but now is when the marketing campaign is in full gear. The problem is that, because I’ve chosen to locate my family in the suburbs these movies are, for the most part, not playing anywhere near me. This was obviously a dumb move and, if I were really a movie fan who was committed to seeing quality flicks I would have chosen to live in the heart of the city.

I’m bringing this up because of a post by Nathanial on the Film Experience blog that points out how ridiculous multi-million dollar marketing campaigns are if you’re not going to make the product being marketed available to as much of the potential audience as possible. This is, and I’m sorry if this isn’t all that constructive, idiotic. If any other business were run like this the company would be, quite frankly, out of business pretty quickly.

Distribution needs to change so that people can see the movies being marketed. Otherwise releasing them theatrically actually wastes money.