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The Creation of "Fan" Sites
jmoore writes "Nothing new that movie makers will do anything to make money from their movies. However, what about making false fan sites to boost a movies image? I couldn't belive it, but sadly it dosen't suprise me much. how depressing." The hype Blair Witch got, as the article points out made the movie industry understand how powerful "grass roots" really is. Reminds me of the Levi jeans pages modeled on the "I kiss you!" guy that people thought were real as well. Ah, marketing.
My question is how do you explain Steve Gutenberg, he happened before the Internet....
The Levi jeans websites Hemos refers to were these sites that Levi Jeans did for some reason... I think they're still up: http://www.rubberburner.com and http://www.supergreg.com... I'm sure there were more.
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You mean the I Kiss You guy wasn't real?
Damn. And I was hoping to go visit him and stay his house.
In this vein, we should create a goase .cx website to hype up the simplistic beauty of this enlightening masterpiece.
Then the proprietor could grant free adverizing space on goatse, to the MPAA
Seripusly, though. as cynical as this sounds, it is nothing new. Somewhere, way inside the lesat obsure link on the site, you might find a statement that "this is an ad" But if not, so what?! IT'S A FAN SITE
What artca$heer isn't a fan of his work?
How many dustcovers on how many novels, have high critical praise from critics that you may not have heard of? How many of those are verifiably unsolicited?
Hmmmm... Anyone else think that we are getting closer and closer to EVERYTHING being about marketing? We aren't allowed to make up our own minds any more. We can't have opinions. If we do, we are obviously not the 'target audience' they're going for. Movies are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. TV shows are only concerned about their 'share'. Niche markets are a thing of the past. Even on the web. Content sites are going down the tubes... or they are bought/run by huge companies posing as fans.
*sigh*
Doesn't anyone else with a brain in their head find this disappointing?
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
Anyone have links or more info?
OK,
- B
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http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
Wired News did an article on this a while back.
-Christian
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
I couldn't belive it, but sadly it dosen't suprise me much.
Why's this? Easy. These guys do simple statistics to model situations. If you've a million fan sites, each claiming to have a million hits/day, then that's a million times a million people who should have paid, right?
Since the cinema intake is going to only be slightly more (if there's any change at all), the ratio of ticket sales to potential customers is going to drop faster than Mir on Penguin Mints.
Result? The guys with money are going to invest in other companies. They're not going to put money in what they see as a looser.
In the end, the best way to capitalize on the movie market is to make decent movies with scripts that require in excess of double-digit IQs and hormone levels below the toxic threshold.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I didn't see Blair Witch specifically because it was so hyped before it came out. At first when I heard about it, I thought, "well that sounds cool". But once all the hype started coming I figured it probably wouldn't be worth my time. And I'm glad I never saw it, from what my friends told me 'bout it. So the internet hype did nothing for me. I'm much more prone to go see something that actually is proven to be a good flik (by word of mouth from co-workers and friends) than to rush into believing a bunch of hype from those pushing their product. If I based my decisions on hype, I'd be buying every last piece of M$ software I could get my hands on! :)
Unless that company paying you pulls its IPO and gets sucked under NASDAQ's nasty grip of things this year. Wonderous how for some instances media is one stop short of saying the Internet is dead.
Last time I did a search on any one particular star, I had to sift through about 1gajillion porn links
This isn't neccessarily news though, maybe since someone actually wrote up an article about it. Fact of the matter is, most advertising agencies have marketers who profile when, where, and how to market to people by ethnicity, social status, etc. When was the last time you saw an ad for Malt Liquor or Birth Control on Rodeo Drive? Theres nothing new to what the studios are doing. Sure its immoral in a sense, but its no better than some marketer chosing one neighborhood because more "bruthas" live there.
Sil the movie
360 degrees of Karma
I worked for a company called Full Moon Interactive Group and I remember that before I started working there, they were hired to do a bunch of fake websites for Sega. This was stated openly on the old fmig.com portfolio pages (anyone with archive.org access find their old pages?), but they don't seem to be up any more. This was around early '98 or so. Could've been Saturn fan sites or something ... I can't remember exactly and I apologize for that.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
Regardless of whether it's a fan site or the New York Times, too many folks accept information without question. Having been on the journalist side of things, it's scary to know just how easy it is to mold the facts to support just about any view. Just find an expert or two that agree with your supposition and suddenly you have news. Of course that's only when you aren't regurgitating the endless stream of PR/marketing crapola that gets thrown at you to 'inform' you of what's newsworthy.
As someone theat trying to build a fansite for new TV show i have to say it sounds like it was probably a bad investment on the studio's part.
Even though my site is dedicated to a show with an extremely high geek quotient, I haven't been able to get my daily hit count above the low double digits. The only way I see this working is if they paid the major search engines and web directories for preferred placement, or if they got links to the site planted in online media with the (also likely paid) cooperation of the media outlet (which we know happens).
Alternatively, they could draw people in (as was aparently the case with American Pie) by using material supposedly obtained surrepticiously from insiders, but that in fact was provided directly by the film's marketing Dept.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
It seems to me that many times fan sites gets left alone until a certain point when the show(or whatever) takes off. Until then, they don't seem to mind too much about fan sites providing pictures, video/audio clips. But once it hits the big bucks fortune and fame, the fan sites gets shut down faster than you can say /.
So in my mind, the "companies" are already playing on this, which I think, sucks.
We have seen it a lot of times where faithful fans were treated as criminals as soon as the "company" don't need their free advertising and trolling.
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Stewart Copeland (of later "Police" Fame) used to write anomynous letters to London music mags bragging about the incredible talent of this new up and coming drummer (himself)
A good chunk of promotion is tooting your own horn, whether you like to admit it or not. Why should it be any different in the modern day. It's all grand and ideal to assume every grassroots movement you see is done by selfless volunteers, but it's almost never that way. Deal with it.
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
The fact that it's fake doesn't make it any less hilarious. It makes it all the more brilliant. The other one they did about the guy who breaks stuff busted my shit up (and I knew it was fake at the time)...
I heard it wasn't Levis but some other company... the name slips my mind, but it was big in the 80s... Lee? Someone like that.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'm really surprised everybody missed out on Travis Latke's Galaxy Quest.
I'm not slow, but when I went back and found it'd been co-opted by Amazon for awhile, I started thinking "Saaaaay, Travis musta turned pro!"
You're not imagining the DiVX site.
The thing to remember is, dishonesty is not new :)
Real fan sites depress me. Why would a rational human being devote dozens of hours to fawning over a piece of commercial entertainment? Does knowing what the stars ate from the craft-services table make the movie better? No. Does Jennifer Lopez sound better when you know who she's dating? No. Will knowing the exact date and hour of the premiere of the next Star Wars movie make it suck any less? No.
A plea to the fawning fanboys - get a life! Direct your energies to something useful. If your skill is in documenting minutia, apply it to an educational or reference site. If you like writing fan-fiction, try creating your own characters and settings for once. If you're good with image/video editing, or with 3d software, work on an original indie creation (or go pro), instead of reenacting the Phantom Menace with South Park characters.
There's a place for sampling existing works and distorting them, but the final product should be original. Think Negativland instead of Pat Boone or Puff Daddy.
Enough ranting for now,
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Back in 1997, we made fan sites and protest sites, for and against "Cyberdiversion" for Heat.net. The fact that we were doing it got more press than the sites themselves ever did...
The funny thing is that one of the sites, "Mothers Against Cyberdiversion" has since been quoted and incorporated into culture several years later by people who had no idea that it was nothing more than a reverse-psychology guerilla marketing effort.
A few years later I was the webmaster for levi.com and its associated domains. While at that time we didn't do any direct misdirection, we would create one-off rough-cut promo sites, including one for redline, designed by the folks at superbad. I left before the age of Mahir, and so didn't have anything to do with those...
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
Provided by the Simpson's folks to be an actual site that Lisa went to one evening to find out what badgers eat. I think it was episode BABF20, but there's no capsule at snpp.com.
While it's not exactly the same thing, as it's pretty obvious that this one is in cahoots with the Simpson's creators, it is still the same kind of guerrila marketing plan. I found it pretty entertaining.
You just enter in some default values:
- Name of the thing you are promoting
- some images, sound clips, other content
Then the engine out generate meaningless babble and fake postings, and all kinds of other BSSomeone you trust is one of us.
put up their own fake fan sites, and then sue the real ones out of existence?
sulli
RTFJ.
Has been doing this for some time now. Harry has whored himself out so often that he's even getting cameos in movies now.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
One of my freinds once had a personal web site. It had some images copyrighted by Nintendo. Nintendo's lawyers sent him a bark letter. He was allowed to continue, but only if he put up a bunch of stuff promoting Pokemon. What else could he do but comply?
Nintendo basicly got advertising for the cost of a bark letter.
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Not a typewriter
A collection of marketing tools and world wide hype sites, with spam filling the spaces in between.
If we are not careful, that is all that will be left.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You are correct. It was Lee Jeans, during their Buddy Lee campaign. Buddy Lee challenged Super Greg to a DJ-off. Buddy Lee won.
It's my understanding that the Beatles used to pay high school girls to scream and faint in the crowd at concerts and other public appearances. What's the big difference?
You've never enjoyed something so much you wished you could be a part of it?
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Got Apathy?
Salon had an article on astro-turf fan sites, with a particular focus on Blair Witch. It was here. It talks about web buzz and Ain't it Cool News and how that stuff impacts movies.
In part it reads:
"The "Blair Witch Project" fan sites deploy similarly suspicious language. The creators of The Blair Witch Project Fanatic's Guide, for example, tell site visitors, "We're just very dedicated fans," and until recently offered suggestions on how other fans might help promote the movie: "Buy TBWP Stock at the Hollywood Stock Exchange! Rank TBWP at the Internet Movie Database! Rank TBWP at Ain't It Cool News!"
But the creators of the site, Abigail Marceluk and Eric Alan Ivins, seem to be more than average fans. They appeared in the Sci-Fi Channel special "Curse of the Blair Witch," and the Rough Cut site links them to the film's back story: "A bit of trivia: Abigail and Eric are the two anthropology students who discover the three film students' 'lost' footage."
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
That doesn't make any sense because BW2 wasn't grass roots at all. Rather, it was exactly what we've come to expect from Hollywood. Maybe it's impossible for a sequel to be grass roots by it's very nature, but in any case BW2 certainly wasn't. It discarded every single element that made the first film special. All BW2 shows is that Artisan didn't know how to properly cash in on grass roots support.
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The Warner Bros. studio has tried to get Harry Potter fan sites taken down. Warner Bros. is currently backing off on this.
Fake fan sites are eerily reminiscent of Bruce Schneier's Semantic Attacks, except that the movie industry is doing it so damn clumsily, and in public.
I agree that fake fan sites are dopey, and won't work. I mean, what attracted Joe Sixpack to The Internet in 1996 and 1997? Was it slick, pre-digested Corporate Ad Collateral? No just "No", but "Hell, NO". What attracts people to The Internet is what other individuals have put out there, whether it be Harry Potter fan sites, Hollywood Bitchslap movie reviews, or AmIHotOrNot. The current upper leadership of mass media outlets just doesn't get it.
In conclusion: Who cares? How could anyone feel ripped off about a fake fan site? The home page for Galaxy Quest was done in the style of a fan site and was truly hilarious.
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crazy dynamite monkey
If a fan site has a name with a trademark/copyright in it and isn't asking for free legal help to fight off movie company attempts to take the name, then it is obviously a fake.
Hence, they've made All Your Brand Are Belong to Us which mostly has a repeating theme, but some are still quite interesting...
You always have to wonder why grass roots always turns into cash roots.. *cough*woodstock*cough*
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Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
It would explain all those Cmdr Taco fanclub sites.
In fact, I read about that on Slashdot. Hmm.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Penalties for this sort of thing may be severe. Now, IANAL, but it occurs to me that movie producers and studios may have deeper than average pockets, and that if you could set some law students to tracking these things down, gathering evidence, and then present it to a law firm, you might be able to find grounds for damages or a class action lawsuit.
It's the American dream in action. Besides, who believes anything they read on the internet, anyways?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Nope. I find it empowering. Look at it this way: if you didn't matter, why would companies spend so much time and money trying to sucker you into buying their stuff?
zo.
there was a BWP2?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
in political science lingo, this is called an "astroturf" movement, for obvious reasons.
perhaps one of the more interesting cases in recent history is Microsofts' infamous attempt (this was circa 1998 or so) at astroturfing...they sent out documents to partners across the usa urging that they (and their employees) send letters of support to their congressmen for "freedom, the american way and microsoft" and that "all care should be taken such that the letters appear to be spontaneous messages of support from disinterested parties".
naturally, word leaked out and the "great innovator" had egg on their face again.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Due to this small causal falicy ("fan sites create buzz" vs. "lots of buzz leads to fan sites"), marketers are often fooled into thinking that astroturfing can create the illusion of lots of people excited about their crappy film or software, which will surely lead to lots of people actually excited... In the end, they always learn, the hard way, that lots of sites saying "Wow! $CRAPPYMOVIE is the best film I've ever seent!!!" fool nobody, and make the company look like complete idiots.
Balmer and Gates probably still blush at the occational chuckle years after they launced their astroturfing efforts. They learned their lesson, and now only buy off mainstream media to pimp their software (i.e., ZDnet).
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The fact is that on the net, it's easy for those fucking parasites to "do something" to justify their bloated salaries.
What crosses the line between a legitimate fan site and a commercial enterprise treading on the copyrights of others? If you aren't even trying to answer this question, then you are an unmitigated evil as far as the future is concerned.
But the quest to recrate a fake version of the things they are trying to destroy is like murdering Indians to clear the way for filming Dances with Wolves. It would be pathetic if it werent' the mother of all assgas straight from Satan's sphincter. Having been near the stuff, I can honestly say it's not the execs that are the problem so much as the toadies surrounding them and flattering them with grandoise fantasies of their power and wisdom who are wrecking culture for everyone.
And it's $10 in parts of Manhattan now.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
You hit the nail right on it's head. Everything is going to be about the market. The market and commerce are likely to be officially above everything in a few years.
Ant it's all going to change this summer when WTO will rule on Brazil's ability to manufacture cheap AIDS drugs for it's patients.
That will realy be the turning point, if WTO will rule in favour of the drug companies, then we will have it "officially" that the companies ability to make profit comes first, absolutely first. Even before human lives.
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Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Quick post without reading, as I read it in this mornings paper...
To me, it seems to underline the Advantage advertisers have that essentially corrupts the free discourse of information between netizens. I argued this with 'loyal opposition' co-workers today. My point: this represents (and you gotta read the article to understand how sleazy this tactic really is) a total rip-off of people's creativity in a deceptful marketing scheme by the big corporations. On Charlie Rose last night, Michael Eisner claimed that the service he provided (he is an ardent hands-on-the-creative-process man) was the aggregate of directors, writers, actors, etc, and that if people on the internet were allowed to trade movies unchecked they would destroy that gathering of talent. "There would be talent, but it would be [dissonant crap]." But if Disney were to imitate Joe Blow's fan website, aren't they denying the creative capacity inherent in all those marketeers?
But the net result of this is a further reduction in the credibility of websites. There is a reason that magazines put the word "Advertisement" on top and bottom of those ads that read like articles. They want to retain credibility. So if this continues, the internet, already a place of dubious ancestry, will suffer a little more as people will have to decide further (just like in their spam mail) whether to believe the source or not.
I think this degrades the value of the entire internet experience. But then again, I don't visit movie fan sites much.
More to the point. Big business wants to have its cake and eat it, too. You can't link to their site, or comment on their 'content', but they can spend big bux and totally copy your fan site and prey on all your potential visitors.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
"It's the very fact that people build obsessive communities around pop entertainment that I find distressing"
pop=popular=whatever most people like.
entertainment=that which is enjoyable.
You don't like the fact that people build communities around what most people enjoy? Just because it's what is enjoyed by most people?
That seems elitist for the sake of it.
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My Journal
I was joking.
I heard about the movie, and didn't go see it (as I suspect many people also did not).
I was making the point that the astroturf hype surrounding the first movie was a case of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"
IOW - it's not the kind of thing that's going to work as a long term marketing strategy, and that this phenomenon will likely fade away. It's 15 minutes are already up.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.