The shoddy fonts of low-budget press releases

When you send out press releases to savvy film review sites, you can't really fool anyone that the movie you're advertising is better than what we would have called "straight to video" back in the day. You, dear reader, won't be surprised to learn that I receive a lot of such press releases from PR people, since they want coverage of their movies a lot more than the big distributors seem to want it -- even though we would seem more likely to give those movies bad reviews.

But just because the movie's probably bad, does that mean that the press release also has to look so shit?

As if typefaces themselves cost money, these press releases tend to rely on blocky, unsophisticated fonts, and usually compound the matter by justifying the text, such that the spacing between words is weird and stretches the words so that the final letter on the right side aligns down the page. Which is not a sophisticated look. 

Because it is necessary for me to provide examples, but not necessary for me to crush the spirits of these little movies, nor of the nice people who try to get me to review them, I will block out identifying information from these examples.

This is another one of those that thinks I live in London, as I discussed here. 

How bad does that third line of text look? If you have to go for justified text, there are more sophisticated ways of doing it, such as slightly spacing out the letters in the words so you don't notice it as much. Not leaving giant spaces between the words that are two to three times greater than all the other spaces in the paragraph.

It turns out I've deleted a lot of the offending emails, so I don't have a huge number of other options to choose from. But here's another that doesn't look nice:

Why are you screaming at me? I think you can use all caps if you have to, but then choose a less severe font. 

It just strikes me as odd that there is no one out there who has said "Hey, you have a shit movie? I can dress it up and make it real nice." This is an imperfect comparison, but it's kind of like how there are very few -- I'm not going to say none at all -- scammers who can send out fake emails that don't include typos. You just get one scammer who is semi competent at imitating a real email, and you'll have scads more personal information you can release on the dark web. 

Okay, I'll let these poor PR people off the hook today. 

Surely the most representative image from Expend4bles

Reminder #7,681 that sex sells. 

When I post my reviews on ReelGood, there's always a master image that goes on the front page, and advertises the review to anyone scrolling through the site. In my view this should be the most representative image of the film I can find. You know, if I were reviewing Forrest Gump, it would be Tom Hanks on the park bench. That sort of thing.

The people who desperately try to sell tickets to their movies so their whole chain doesn't go under have a different agenda.

I mean, in the shameless field of movie advertising, there's accentuating an attractive woman in your movie who is one of the movie's main characters, and then there's just throwing flesh out there for flesh's sake.

I can't actually tell who this is a picture of, other than Jason Statham, but I looked on IMDB, and I don't think it's Megan Fox. It might be Levy Tran, but her hair appears to be blonde in the movie. And she's the 11th listed in the cast.

Okay in looking at other pictures, I guess it is Megan Fox. I guess she still has some remaining bits of sex appeal.

But the point is, is a picture of her in mid-ecstasy with Jason Statham really what you want people to believe they'll be getting if they go to this movie?

And in these desperate times, does that even matter anymore?

Expend4bles needed to figure out how to put Barbie, Ken or Robert Oppenheimer in the ensemble and they'd've been fine. 

Star subterfuge

The marketing team behind Tom Hardy's new movie has brought deceit to a new level. You might almost call it legendary.

This ad for Legend contains what appears to be an overwhelming onslaught of four- and five-star reviews praising the film. And in most respects, it legitimately is just that.

But the marketing team got greedy. I guess they couldn't find exactly 12 reviews that were at least four stars, so they added a two-star review in there.

Can't see it? It's the one between Tom Hardy's left ear and Tom Hardy's right ear.

Oh, you're meant to think it's just another 4+ review. But Benjamin Lee, critic for The Guardian, tweeted otherwise:

"Incredible way of making my two-star review seem like I didn't hate the film."

What's brilliant about this is that this ad is completely not lying. There are only two stars above the words The Guardian, and that's exactly the number of stars Lee gave the film. It's misleading, for sure, but all is fair in love, war and advertising, right?

What's not brilliant about this is that someone should have anticipated that the subterfuge would be uncovered. And if they knew Lee, who sounds a bit cheeky, then they should have guessed that he might do something like this. (I don't know Lee from a hole in the ground, but anyone who maintains an active Twitter profile is liable to say anything, as we have repeatedly learned.) Either they didn't consider that, or they did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that whatever negative publicity might be generated over a calling out of such manipulation would pale in comparison to the positivity of seeing that impressive fleet of stars.

The one real design flaw is leaving "only" four stars above the head of the Hardy on the left, which is the only place on the ad that calls attention to the fact that less than the full number of stars was given. Of course, that gets us into the whole problem that not everyone uses a five-star scale anyway. Sometimes, four is the maximum number of stars, which is why you'll sometime see (out of 4) appear after the star rating. Since maximalism is the principle at play in such advertising, you'd only do to indicate that the film had received the full number of available stars. That's why you never see (out of 5), because a) 4.5 stars assumes the existence of a five-star scale, b) it's not needed with five stars because there's no commonly used scale that includes more than five stars, and c) if it's only four stars, you don't want to be honest about it only getting 80% of the way there; you want the user to retain the belief that this could be the maximum number of stars.

Of course, beyond any star-related shenanigans, this ad also commits a cardinal sin that I've written about before, using the word "unmissable," which is barely even a word. Unless we're talking about asteroids with a mathematical certainty of hitting Earth, nothing is "unmissable."

In this case in particular, Benjamin Lee would be inclined to agree.

Sexy Moon

I've complained before about the use of only the most steamy images to advertise a movie, especially in situations where the movie is not remotely steamy. It's a concession to the reality that sex sells.

But this week I encountered the silliest example I've seen in a while. Silly enough to warrant its own post, methinks.

My wife borrowed Moon from the library this week, forgetting that Duncan Jones' 2009 masterpiece is actually a part of our permanent collection. As much as it might interest me to watch a BluRay version of the movie -- our copy is DVD -- we needless to say have not thrown it on. (Perhaps "needless" only because I am in the throes of finishing my 2014 ranking season.)

In gathering the rentals up into a stack, however, I did notice the back of the packaging, which includes the image above as one of three "typical" shots from the film.

As if.

Those of you who have seen Moon will know that it has very little to do with Sam Bell's relationship with his wife -- or at least, not a relationship where they are both physically present. Sam is isolated in a moonbase, going slowly (rapidly?) crazy as his four-year deployment winds down into its final two weeks. He imagines returning home to Tess, his wife, and there may be a flashback or two to when they were together.

But anyone who rents this movie thinking it will be an erotic space opera will be sorely disappointed. It's not that kind of "moon."

The sad reality, though, is that tactics like this are necessary when a movie doesn't perform as well as its distributor felt it could have. It's the same reason we get the ridiculous video poster for The Matador rather than its sublime theatrical poster (see here for that particular discussion).

I guess some sexy advertising is a small price to pay for the movie getting made as the director intended it ... and for the sexy material not getting inserted into the actual product.

Cannibalizing future profits - so to speak

The last envelope I returned to Netflix came emblazoned with the following image:

Edward Cullen. As if we don't see enough of his handsome mug.

Now, I certainly understand the instinct to partner yourself with a wildly successful franchise, and the positive byproducts of that might be immeasurable.

But don't you think it's a little strange that a company that relies on people not seeing movies in the theater is telling them to go see a movie in the theater?

Unlike Blockbuster, which recently tried to dupe its unsuspecting email audience by intimating that the new release End of Watch was available for rental in its stores (see discussion here), Netflix clearly states that Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 is "only in theaters" (as that small text above the release date reads).

But the more people who catch it in theaters, the fewer people there will be to rent it from Netflix later on. This advertisement has a direct, though probably small, impact on the company's bottom line.

Perhaps this is just an acknowledgement by Netflix that the movie's zeitgeist moment is now, not three months from now when it comes out on DVD. The Twilight movies probably get a higher percentage of their viewings in the theater than any other successful franchise out there. Whereas most other successful movies have a significant number of people who rent them "just to see what all the fuss is about," you can't really say the same for the Twilight movies. Most people already know what the fuss is about. Either they're into the fuss, which means they see the movies in the theater (perhaps multiple times), or they can't get far enough away from the fuss, and they never see them at all.

Let's anticipate the first year of existence for Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 and for another wildly successful movie, The Avengers (which I was in the minority by not seeing in the theater). Let's say that in this first year, The Avengers gets 75% of its viewings in the theater and 25% on video. I have no idea if that's correct, but it sounds plausible. That 75% would represent its peak, because from now until the end of time, the only way for most people to see The Avengers will be on video. So the percentage will start at 75% and keep dropping a little bit every day. Eventually, if the movie endures in popularity through the decades, more people will have seen it on video than in the cinema.

While the percentage will also drop for Breaking Dawn Part 2, it doesn't seem likely to drop as much. Its first year will probably be more like 90%/10%, and it will fall only very, very slowly. It may take a generation to get down to 80%/20%. There are always going to be young girls who are going to come of age and seek out the Twilight books, but fewer and fewer random other people will watch these movies as their zeitgeist moment gets further and further in the rear view mirror.

I'm probably belaboring a fairly obvious point, but the point I'm trying to make is that Netflix is probably just fine with advertising Twilight on their return envelopes, because there was never going to be a particularly sizable rental market for this movie anyway. Sure, three months from now will be a good time for some of these folks to see it again -- but they're not going to rent it. If they loved it, they'll just buy it.

The real risk with this marketing strategy is that it will do more harm than good from a "coolness of brand" standpoint. After all, the effect of being associated with Twilight is not a universally positive one. Some people (like me) will see this ad campaign and think "Lame." And Netflix will have suffered, however infinitesimally, in my estimation. 

The other explanation is that this is just a brand new marketing venture for Netflix, and Edward Cullen just happens to be the first of many faces we're going to see gracing our return envelopes.

As is often the case with my theories, time alone will tell.

Of course, much of this discussion is made moot by the following important little detail: Netflix is a subscription service, not a pay-by-rental service. They don't care if users are renting Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, as long as the monthly subscription fee is being automatically debited from their bank accounts.

So maybe they're just trying to limit the number of Breaking Dawn DVDs they'll have to stock to meet the demand.

And now we're getting to the truly measurable impact on their bottom line.

Santa Monica Place, brought to you by Yogi Bear!

I once dated a girl who worked for a public relations company that specialized in the touring versions of big Broadway shows. I'm sure what they did is more complicated than that, but that's basically what it boiled down to.

A thing I learned from her is that when it comes to advertising on radio, it's an absolute no-no to have the same ad run twice in the same "pod" -- the same break between content. Advertisers sign contracts that stipulate the circumstances under which they want their advertisements to run, and they pay different amounts depending on the desirability of the time slot or the radio show. Sometimes, however, these get screwed up. And as a "make-good" that will air the ad the number of times specified in the contract, on rare occasions the radio station will air it twice in the same pod.

However, this is something for which the radio station should be severely punished, if the advertiser is monitoring the airing of their ads (and the advertiser is always monitoring the airing of their ads). See, it's overkill -- no prospective customer wants to have the same thing pitched to him over and over in the same small window of time. It negatively incentivizes the product in question.

Which is why I don't understand why a movie (like Yogi Bear) wants to wallpaper a mall (like the newly remodeled Santa Monica Place) with its posters. It seems to me the very definition of overkill.

I noticed the Yogi Bear advertising blitz when I was shopping there with my wife and son a couple weekends ago. Needless to say, I tucked it away for further discussion on the blog, when Yogi Bear was on the verge of its release.

Posters and/or banners and/or billboards for Yogi Bear hang everywhere. You've seen the one that greets you at the doors of all the mall's elevators -- it's at the top of this post. But how about this one?

Or this one?

Or this one?


Or this one?


Creating awareness is one thing. Bludgeoning us is quite another.

I first noticed this "strategy" at another nearby mall earlier this fall. It was the Fox Hills Mall in Culver City, and the entertainment property that had taken this mall by storm was the CW cheerleading show (which I did not for the longest time realize was about cheerleading) Hellcats. Wish I'd taken a picture of that -- you could literally look down the long open space in the middle of the mall and see a dozen different giant posters for the show. I wasn't going to watch it anyway, but after this embarrassing display, I wasn't going to watch it even more.

Not that I would/should expect subtlety from a 3D movie about two CGI bears stealing pic-a-nic baskets. But I just think they're shooting themselves in the foot, at least in this one location -- a location that is shiny and new and visited by a lot of people, especially during the holiday shopping season. What may have seemed to them like smart positioning of their product in an attempt to help it subliminally sink in, has instead come across to at least one prospective customer (me) as the kind of oversaturation to laugh and blog about. Then again, I probably wasn't going to be seeing Yogi Bear anyway, even if the guy who wrote it is a friend of a friend.

It's the kind of advertising campaign that is not smarter than any bear, and would never be tolerated on the radio.