Swing Vote

(Here’s the trailer.)

This is an “honest man in politics” movie, much like Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, in which Jimmy Stewart is a naive senator who learns to make the system work for him, Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, in which Gary Cooper is a good ol’ boy who outsmarts city slickers with his down-home common sense, and Dave, in which Kevin Kline, a presidential look-alike and comedic impersonator, finds himself standing in for the real thing.

Dave is perhaps the most similar to Swing Vote, in that it’s also a “little guy shouldered with great responsibility” movie. Another relevant example is Amazing Grace And Chuck, in which little-league pitcher Joshua Zuehlke (never did another movie) decides to stop playing ball until there are no more nuclear weapons on the planet, inspiring a string of professional athletes to follow suit. (Am I the only person who actually saw that movie in the theater?) Citizen Ruth places Laura Dern (playing the most oblivious and irresponsible mother imaginable) at the center of the abortion debate.

About Swing Vote itself: Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon And New York Sales Tax

In yesterday’s NYT, Saul Hansell asks whether Amazon will lose business in New York, because customers in that state will now have to pay sales tax on their Amazon purchases. Taking a cue from an economist, he suggests that: “convenience…may be more valued by online shoppers than a not insignificant discount,” but ultimately concludes:

“Still I’m sure some bargain hunters…will start exploring smaller online stores that still are not required to collect the sales tax.”

Well…not really. True-blue “bargain hunters” value a low price over both brand familiarity and convenience. And those people were already not married to buying from Amazon. Witness Book Burro, a Greasemonkey extension that allows Firefox users to look at a book page on Amazon while simultaneously viewing prices for the same book from other sellers…as well as availability at their local library. For New York users of Book Burro, Amazon paying state sales tax is just one of many factors that allow them to decide what to buy on a book-by-book basis.

Speaking of a book-by-book basis. The fact that Amazon has to pay state sales tax does not mean Read the rest of this entry »

Burn After Reading

All detective movies, even the comedies, follow the same formula. A small-time guy is sucked into a big-time situation. At first, the detective thinks his goal is simple: collect some money, photograph an infidelity, track down a ditzy ingénue. He has no interest in the big picture. But the original task turns out to be more difficult than he imagined. In fact, merely extracting himself from the situation will require him to understand it, and his quest to do that expands his knowledge of how complex the world is and how depraved people can be. Ultimately, he finds himself the focal point of a high-stakes battle that affects many people, and shoulders him with a great moral responsibility that he doesn’t want.

The crux of the humor in Burn After Reading is that Read the rest of this entry »

Media Planning Basics 2: What Has Come Before

Once you know what your client wants, you need to find out what they’ve done before.

Don’t work in a vacuum. It’s surprising how often clients don’t offer this information up front. More often, they’ll come to you and effectively say “Another agency ran some media plans for us that didn’t do very well. We fired them. Maybe you’ll do better.” In fact, sometimes the client may be so eager to leave behind their last partner that they don’t want to talk about who they were or what they did. But you’ve got to get that information. If you can, get hold of the actual media plans and the actual reporting and analysis that the last agency gave to the client.

If the last media planner made obvious mistakes, then you might see your whole media strategy opening up for you right there. Maybe they chose the right sites, but spread the impressions out too thin, or put them in the wrong positions. I had a client who showed me their previous planner’s report, indicating zero clicks and zero conversions over the entire campaign…in other words, they hadn’t been tracking it properly.

Structure sets you free. It’s such a satisfying feeling to be able to go back to the client and say with confidence: “Okay, we know what the other planners did wrong, and that’s where we want to start. Here’s where they screwed up, and here’s what we’re going to change, and here are the results you’re going to see.”

Clients can wrap their heads around that. It’s a lot more appealing than hearing “We ran some reports in MRI, and we cross-referenced the sites that index highest for your target demographic with the sites that offer the lowest CPMs, and we’ve determined that all your customers are waiting for you at Flickr!” Because if that’s all you have, then those customers had better be there, or you’ve just killed your credibility (and that of your tools) in the client’s eyes.

Not that you can’t come up with something beyond what MRI tells you without referring to an old plan…you can, and should…eventually. But old, failed plans are what you’re being compared to anyway, so you might as well seize the opportunity. Heroes are defined by the villains they defeat.

Indy 4

The edgy silence that pervades the theater while this trailer plays is a lot like the kind of silence you feel when you watch one of the people you respect most in the world take a pratfall. You sort of sit there and wait for guidance as to how you should feel about it. In other words, it’s almost an embarrassed silence, but not quite, because, hey, everyone is thinking, this could be good. After all, we still don’t really know anything about the movie.

But see, when a trailer doesn’t tell you anything about the movie, that’s almost always a bad sign. It usually means that the movie isn’t strong enough to sell itself, so the trailer has to do it. And in this case, all the trailer has to say is, “Look! Another Indy movie!”

And no doubt, in this particular case, that’s going to get asses in seats. And yet…we’re treated to not a
single genuine character moment, not a single in-joke, not even a hint to reassure us that there is actually going to be a story in there somewhere. We get to hear Indy warn his fellow spelunkers: “Don’t touch anything,” and we are asked to share a chuckle as Marion says that she doesn’t think Indy plans his chase scene tactics very far ahead…and yet, these are both non-ironic recyclings of dialog we’ve already heard. And sure enough, there’s the hot Nazi (or Nazi-esque) villainess.

It’s also possible that the movie is a masterpiece of nuance and terseness, the likes of which Tarkovsky would have been jealous of, and that the studio is afraid nobody will want to see that, so they’re releasing a nonsensical trailer containing only the parts of the movie that are likely to be enjoyed by the mouth-breathers. But I doubt it.

Indy 4 Trailer (I can’t even bring myself to write out the retarded full name of the film.)