Quick Takes 5/11/07

• Kevin at Newsarama looks at the extension of movie and TV franchises into comics, which serve the purpose of both promoting the movie and expanding those universes.
• Trailers are becoming a powerful promotional vehicle for video games.
• If it weren’t for the fact that EVERY OTHER scheme like this one, to put small chips on DVDs that need to be disabled at the register before the disc will work, had resulted in the discs being unplayable for large portions of the audience I might be more enthusiastic.
• Rob Corddry will host this year’s Key Art Awards, awarding work in movie marketing.
• Promotional marketers (presumably including some number of movie marketers) prefer email to other forms of communication. Email beats out every other form of digital/online medium in usage penetration.
• DVDs enhanced with educational materials tied to the movie, ranging from easy to read captions to more substantive materials, are a big hit with educators and parents looking to get something educational for their kids.
• This review for Mike White’s Year of the Dog says the movie is quite different in execution than the way it was marketed, which was primarily to socially conscious types.
• The Weinstein Co. will handle marketing and distribution for Michael Moore’s next film, Sicko.
• You can head on over to IGN and watch a blooper reel for The Ex.
• Chud has some nice pics of the Transformers building wrap promotion. [Thanks to Peter for the tip]
• Captivity has been rated with an R, ending the suspense over the MPAA’s handling of this flick.
• The MPAA says films with smoking should receive more restrictive ratings. Yet people continue to get killed by the score with nary an eye being batted. I’m just saying.

LOTD: 5/11/2007

• Monster, up for grabs, maybe? (TB)
• I can’t help but echo Dave Winer’s mention of this great item from Matt Mullenweg regarding the use of WordPress. (TB)
• As hard as I tried, I couldn’t resist posting a link to something about HBO’s Bob Zitter saying that DRM just needs a new name for it to be successful. In any case, I give you this from Good Morning Silicon Valley. (TB)
• ClickZ is getting tongues a-wagging about a rumored ad network purchase made by Google that hasn’t been made public yet. (CT)

Kidneys and widgets

The fact that my youngest son was born with severe kidney problems that eventually led to him receiving a transplant isn’t something that I talk about a lot, at least not online. It’s a personal matter and best left offline for the most part. But I would like to take a minute and do tell his story here.

Before he was born the doctors determined he had two essentially useless kidneys that had just never developed. At the young age of one and half years he was (after successfully avoiding dialysis) old enough and strong enough to receive a transplanted kidney, a kidney I was more than happy to part with. That was almost two years ago and he is doing better than either myself or my wife could have imagined. Life is different when you have a transplant patient but the kidney is doing well and my wife is on top of all his medical needs.

To celebrate how well he is doing, my family and I are participating in The National Kidney Foundation of Illinois’ Gift of Life Walk this July and we’re raising money for that organization. I hate to ask for donations but if you feel so moved we – and the group the money goes toward – would be most appreciative. It’s groups like this that allow doctors to diagnose problems early, something that saved my son’s life before he was even born.

Sentimentality aside, I wanted to point out something kind of cool about all this. The NKFI, when you sign up as a team for the event, has a section where you can spread the word of your fund raising efforts. And on that page is code for you to create and publish your own widget, something I immediately grabbed and put on my personal site. That’s great that an organization like this has embraced such a simple way to help people spread the word. My publishing that on MMM resulted in $150 being donated in the first two hours alone, something that far exceeded my expectations.

Thanks for indulging this personal note.

–Chris

It’s funny, I was able to find the “Contact Us” link…

We PR bloggers are in a unique situation. On the one hand we feel it our responsibility to point out how some companies are failing to fully embrace the world of online media and such. Sometimes we do that in the form of blog posts, sometimes it’s on things like Twitter where there’s a conversation going on.

But on the other hand I think there’s a certain amount of empathizing that needs to occur before we take a company to task publicly. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes for 30 seconds (you might call that putting yourself in a 30-second spot, but then Jaffe would have to slap you) and think about how you would feel if your client were the one about to be trashed. Wouldn’t you appreciate a quick email if someone was having a problem? I know I would – and have.

I think it’s important that we remember, as our reliance on web-based services increases, that problems and hiccups are going to occur. Gmail will go down. Newsgator will occasionally eat some feeds. Twitter might not update immediately. We all throw out little comments – more like heads-up alerts than anything, and lately especially on Twitter – when something goes down. When these things happen we have three options:

1) Go get a cup of coffee and wait it out
2) If we think it’s a serious problem we can use the contact form on the website
3) If we know they have a community evangelist out there in the…ummm…community we could contact them
4) Blog about every single outage like we’re the only person to whom the company should be answerable

I usually choose #1. If I know a person who fits the #3 bill I might do that. But I try not to resort to #4 unless things have not gone well with the other options.

I wouldn’t want my clients getting trashed over what are, essentially, growing pains (or stupid happenings – hey, it’s software). I therefore try not to do that because I can imagine how lousy I would feel. Plus I wouldn’t want to do that to the people I know. Jeremy and I seem to be in agreement on this point based on his comment. I just think it’s more polite to everyone involved to handle this privately first before publicly embarrassing a company and its agents, but that’s just me.

Rethinking the movie experience

The other day I pointed to a comment by Mark Cuban where he was thinking out loud about redefining the movie going experience. I just considered it a cuban thing and didn’t go too much deeper mentally into it.

Thankfully Alex has, putting up two posts on the subject that absolutely need to be read by anyone who’s frustrated with how theaters are arranged nowadays and long for them to be more friendly.