Marketing people can sometimes "get it," but usually they don’t. This is a perfect case where they just don’t have a clue. Ron Gilbert retells how a marketing company tried to drum up some grassroots advertising campaign for Serenity, which incidentally, opened about 20 minutes ago in New York, and it will do the same here in Chicago in about 40 minutes. The marketing company sends out thousands of e-mails to bloggers, informing them about an exclusive opportunity to attend a screening for the cinematic Joss Whedon sci-fi/western phenomenon.
Being a marketing company making such an offer, of course there was a catch: in order to attend, a blogger had to flood their blog with canned marketing hype about the movie. Then, after attending the screening, continue to generate positive hype about it on your blog. Granted, a movie based on the phenomenon that was Firefly, done by Whedon himself, would be difficult to pan. Nevertheless, a blogger with any credibility can’t just assume that Whedon’s god-like storytelling abilities are always in full force, and he should give Serenity a fair review.
So, refusing to be a part of the cog in such a ridiculous machine, Gilbert skipped on the "offer" and just posted about his negative experience with the whole deal. And here I am recalling Gilbert’s disappointment at what could have been a great publicity wave for Serenity. I suppose that even this isn’t really bad press for the movie, so much as it is bad press for Grace Hill Media, the buffoons behind the marketing mishap.
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