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.

Comments

It will never stop...

[jhaberman]

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

Re:It will never stop...

[Sarcasmooo!]

Well I agree whole-heartedly, but most people probably think I'm a little to extreme in my reasons. See, personally, I find it appalling that businesses are even allowed to take this sort of aggressive stance. It ticks me off just to see commercials that are directly targetting children in a manipulative 'buy-me-to-fit-in-at-school' sort of way. I don't believe that corporations are people, and I don't believe they have rights that people have. The people who comprise those companies, of course, have every right that anyone else does. Even the founding fathers understood this. Before the early 1900's, and before commercialization became the norm, it was illegal for corporations to give any money to politicians. I don't have a quote offhand, but all the way back to the 1700's Benjamin Franklin himself would talk about how restrictions on money, and restrictions on ownership of media (that existed before the Telecommunications Act of 1996), were paramount to preserving a democracy. Otherwise a business like his own newspaper could manipulate the government and monopolize the only medium through which people could ever hear about it.

But that's what what we have now, and it got that way through compromise after compromise, supposedly in the name of freedom and capitalism. The problem is that the public can't compete with the mechanized efficiency of big business. Microsoft lobbyists are formed up on capitol hill pushing UCITA while most Americans are at home watching MicroSoft NBC's latest incitefull coverage of some tear-jerking tale of loss and eventual triumph over something or other.

Enough already. These multinational corporations do business in places where the constitution means nothing, and human rights are non-existent. They're not our friends, they're not human beings with common sense, or even morals. Obviously they've proven my point; a business is operated by individuals, but it has no conscience, it acts as a machine would to achieve maximum efficiency. Anyone who's familiar with the term 'soft money' or 'corporate welfare' should understand what we're dealing with these days. The 'American People' and 'Corporate America' can't exist as equals, when the second of the two is dominant in it's very nature. Corporate America has to take the subserviant role, and not because the bill of rights is subjective -- but because when they don't, the rights of the public and the rights of the same people at the helm of Corporate America, get squelched.


/vent

That's your story?

[dangermouse]

I couldn't belive it, but sadly it dosen't suprise me much.

... and you're sticking to it?

Fake Fandom

[jd]

In the long term, it's going to be, ummm, counter-productive. Not cos it's stupid (although it is), but because the people the movie directors and studios are trying to impress, the guys with money, are going to perceive the popularity of the movie as LOWER than it really is.

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.

Too bad it works...

[cowboy junkie]

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.

Sounds like a bad investment on the studio's part

[Cy Guy]

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.

Real fan sites live until show takes off.

[Bender Unit 22]

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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Decouple from the hype train.

[isaac]

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

Hardly new (Heat.net, levi.com)

[KFury]

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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Re:marketing drones

[Greyfox]

Last time I did a search on any one particular star, I had to sift through about 1gajillion porn links...

It works better if you don't look for porn stars...

What you say!!

[Lord Omlette]

You've never enjoyed something so much you wished you could be a part of it?
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057

Blair Witch expose

[L-Train8]

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."

Re:Not hardly...

[localman]

All the "Blair Witch", in the long term, proved was that "Grass Roots" couldn't do it more than once (re: the major flop that BWP2 was).

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.

An amusing variation....

[fm6]

ESPN created a phony webcam site, featuring a camgirl who spends all her time talking about how ESPN sucks.

__________________

Re:Not hardly...

[jafac]

there was a BWP2?

Absolutely ...

[AftanGustur]

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.

--
Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?