I started Media Mandible a few years ago, in order to show prospective employers and clients that I had a clue what was going on in the worlds of technology and advertising. It served its purpose well enough. I’ve also been keeping two othe blogs: Miconian, which was more personal, and Trailers Undone, which was an attempt to munge together my film background and my advertising background. The idea was to keep my output more or less siloed, so that clients didn’t have to read about my personal life, friends who don’t care about advertising don’t have to read about it, and people who keep me in their lives mainly to ask which DVD to rent would get what they wanted as well.
But I’ve found that my brain just doesn’t work that way. In the world of creative commercialism, there’s a cliche that structure sets you free, but, in blogging anyway, I don’t find that to be the case. Being aware of the silos I’d set for myself made me less motivated to blog. I would come up with a new entry, then realize that it didn’t fit neatly into any of the three categories (personal, work, movies), struggle with it briefly, get distracted, and never write it.
Besides, I felt that I wasn’t really representing myself accurately by posting in silos. If you know me offline, you know that my discourse is a hodgepodge of personal anecdotes, work, and whatever movie I saw 20 years ago that you just reminded me of. My hope here is to bring that same experience to you here, in written form.
Trailers Undone will soon be moving onto this blog as well. I’m happy to keep pontificating on movie trailers, but I would prefer not to have to do it so often that my blog starts to look sick if I don’t update every few days.
What exactly will miconian be about? I do have some general categories in mind:
- geekin’ it old school – Anecdotes about growing up as a geek in the 80s, and how things have changed (and stayed the same, etc.).
- movie trailer fridays – I deconstruct the latest over-hyped trailer and help you justify not seeing the movie.
- doom and gloom Mondays – I thought it might be nice to kick off each week by highlighting the absolute worst thing that happened over the weekend, or perhaps during all of the previous week.
- personal stories from the entrepreneurial front (although, how very droll, I mean, so many bloggers do that already)
- tips for pseudo-intellectuals – I provide a bit of actual information that you can cut with baby laxative and sell on the corner to people dumber than you.
- the miconian insight community – I will be assembling a group of witty people (I also think of this as the ‘witty people community’) who will be contributing pithy anecdotes and insights on various topics, especially if they get paid to do so by a large corporation.
Studios can make all the piracy-condemning PSA’s they want, but the truth is that they’d rather you see their movie illegally than never see it at all. In fact, piracy has already become built into the way they market movies to begin with. Internet gossip tells the public which blockbusters will be showing which hot new trailer. At the very first screening on opening day, when the lights go down and previews of coming attractions start rolling, electronic eyes in the audience record and transmit them to those waiting in their homes across the world, often days before the trailers are officially available online. Like most people, my first glimpse of Heath Ledger as the Joker wasn’t an unexpected perk of a $12.00 movie ticket, but via shaky, grainy video on YouTube. We vigilant media truffle-hunters all congratulated ourselves for our precocity and then passed the link on to others, perpetuating the kind of word-of-mouth anticipation that studios would pay for if they had to — but since they don’t, they never will.
And we’re not just helping them sell movies, we’re helping them make movies. The latest trend in trailer-bootlegging is the network of comic book conventions which have become all but overrun by Hollywood press junkets in recent years (often for films that have nothing to do with comics at all, like I Now Declare You Chuck and Larry). Screen a test-trailer for an army of comic book nerds while a film is still in production, allow it to leak online and generate tons of criticism, and then modify the work-in-progress to better meet audience expectations. The Tron remake probably won’t come out until 2011, but we’ve already drooled over the test-footage from last year’s SDCC and told creators exactly what we’d like to see them do with it.
The SDCC also showed a full-length trailer for the new Wolf Man movie starring Benicio Del Toro, which was supposed to open in February 2009. Perhaps based on the wildly positive reception of the “leaked” trailer, Universal rescued the film from its unceremonious midwinter release and is pouring more love into its post-production and marketing, obviously re-imagining it as a dark jewel in their crown of fall features, perhaps even a contender for next year’s Oscars. Meanwhile the trailer’s still only online in wobbly second-hand form, which means that anyone who stumbles across it — which of course is only as hard as googling “Wolf Man trailer” — gets to feel they’ve stumbled upon a cache of rare goods, one that they’re likely to show off to their friends (like I just did right here).
As someone who always makes sure to get to the movies on time so I can catch all the coming attractions firsthand — and gets hostile when others talk over them — I could bellyache about having to rely on someone else’s quick draw with their iPhone to see the first snippets of the new Star Trek. I could lament that cinephiles have been removed one degree further from something they love, settling for the vicarious thrill of watching a clip of other people watching a clip — in fact, the amount of vloggers out there who post reaction videos to whatever pop media they’re ingesting makes it a cinch to find clips of people watching clips of other people watching trailers.
At the same time, while they’re as vital to the ritual of moviegoing as popcorn and broken water-fountains (and often a grand consolation prize if the feature presentation is an utter disappointment) that doesn’t mean that trailers are sacrosanct. They are, after all, commercials — that’s all they ever have been, and the only rule that matters in advertising is to remain a step ahead of your consumers. If the consumers subvert your strategies and usurp your role, then you find a way to wriggle back on top. (I’ve watched two whole seasons of Mad Men, I know what I’m talking about.)
The effect on the movies themselves is the more ominous issue. Have we entered the age of being given the movies that we deserve? We demand them, shape them, and criticize them before they appear, we bookmark their websites and hunt for stills and clips, we read plot outlines, leaked scripts, filmmaker interviews, celebrity gossip; via the almighty internet, we inform the artists what we’ll accept and what we’ll spit out, when to pull the rug and where to plant the trap — all before we ever set foot in a theater. Is it any wonder we so rarely feel thoroughly satisfied when we walk out? The appetizer has become the meal.
Still, we trailer-worshipers should probably feel grateful — rather than making them obsolete, the internet and its video-sharing networks have reinvented appreciation of them, giving rise to a malleable, open-source artform in which everyone is invited to present their own Brokeback Mountain parody or paint their favorite kids’ movie as a Requiem for a Dream spin-off. This firsthand experience is becoming nearly inseparable from that second- or thirdhand experience, making would-be leakers and bootleggers of us all. But in the critical moment, as the moon rises in the sky over Benicio, all is forgiven, all is permitted; desire truly makes beasts of us all.
So you know what the client wants, and you know what they’ve done before. Now it’s time to establish KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). In other words, you have to determine on what basis the success or failure of the campaign is going to be determined.
The trick here is that the goals the client gives you probably don’t translate directly into realistic KPIs. They might say, to use the most common example, that they want to “increase awareness of the brand.” This sounds good in theory, but it’s hard to measure. Or rather, the way in which it is best measured is up for argument. It’s necessary to have that discussion up front, before the campaign is even planned.
Some common KPIs: click-through rate, ROI, conversion rate, and increase in web traffic.
I’ve seen some agencies talk about “impressions delivered” as if this is a KPI. But really, the number of impressions delivered, once the campaign has been planned, is a measure of basic competency, mostly on the part of the publisher.
If “awareness” is really what you’re going for, then run an awareness study before and after the campaign…if you’re thinking online online only, then it’s common to use Dynamic Logic or someone similar. But that costs money and takes time, and the client may not go for that…which is fine. That gives you the opportunity to say, “Okay, so it looks like we can’t actually measure awareness. So let’s talk about what we are going to measure.”
Clients sometimes squirm during this type of discussion, because they often have no idea what to say. This is a great opportunity for you, the media planner to introduce your own ideas about what the KPIs ought to be. In this way, you are outlining the metrics of your own success.
KPIs should be simple. Draw a distinction in your own mind between what you could use as KPIs and what you should use as KPIs. If you know ad ops and analytics very well, you probably have all kinds of metrics that you could bring into consideration. And maybe you should…later on, as icing on the cake. But for now, keep it simple.
It’s worth noting that the person who drives the up-front discussion of KPIs usually has to be the media planner. That’s because it’s a discussion that takes place around the same time that the deal with the client is being cinched, and during that time, nobody else involved, at either company, is really interested in thinking about or discussing the end of the campaign, or even, in many cases, the details of what the campaign is going to be like. But for your own good (and, it’s worth noting, the good of the client), you have got to make that conversation happen.
Also, don’t fall into the trap of letting the client misuse the KPI conversation to set you up for failure. “Okay, the KPI is clicks, and we expect a 30% CTR,” is not an acceptable conclusion.
I’ve been a loyal customer of gandi.net for a while now…cheap, no-frills domain registration services (and other related services that I’ve never looked into).
Recently, I found out that godaddy.com was giving domain registrations away more cheaply (about $9/year, compared to gandi’s 12 Euros/year). So when it came time to register a domain for my mother’s travel agency site, I went with godaddy.
I’m not sure how many screens I had to click through, unchecking boxes that were opting me in to additional services I didn’t want, searching the screen to be sure that the button I was about to click on was the real “continue” button, and not one of many buttons upon which a click would actually indicate my agreement to purchase some other service. To tell you, I’d have to go through it all again.
The next day, a customer service from godaddy called me to welcome me to the company, and to ask if he could help me in any way. He was very polite, insofar as people with that kind of job can be polite and still get paid. Getting him to accept that the conversation was over without hanging up on him was not easy.
Anyway, the rest of the story is obvious. Today I registered another domain. I started to use godaddy again, but after a few minutes of unchecking boxes and double-checking the site navigation, I closed the window and registered the domain at gandi. It took less than two minutes.
I used to see gandi as a discount registrar, but I now see them as offering a premium service: the implicit agreement to leave me the hell alone and let me register my domains in peace.
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