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Why Movie Trailers Now Begin With Five-Second Ads For Themselves (theverge.com)
Chris Plante, reporting for The Verge: Jason Bourne takes off his jacket, punches a man unconscious, looks forlornly off camera, and then a title card appears. The ad -- five seconds of action -- is a teaser for the full Jason Bourne trailer (video), which immediately follows the teaser. In fact, the micro-teaser and trailer are actually part of the same video, the former being an intro for the latter. The trend is the latest example of metahype, a marketing technique in which brands promote their advertisements as if they're cultural events unto themselves. [...] Last year, the studio advertised the teaser for Ant-Man with a ten-second cut of the footage reduced to an imperceptive scale. [...] But where previous metahype promoted key dates in a marketing campaign -- like official trailer releases and fan celebrations -- the burgeoning trend of teasers within trailers exist purely to retain the viewer's attention in that exact moment. The teaser within the trailer speaks to a moment in which we have so many distractions and choices that marketers must sell us on giving a trailer three minutes of our time. This practice isn't limited to movie trailers, though. Next time you're on Facebook, pay attention to how the popular videos in your newsfeed are edited. Is the most interesting image the first thing you see? And does that trick get you to stop scrolling and watch?
...Next time you're on Facebook, pay attention to how the popular videos in your newsfeed are edited. Is the most interesting image the first thing you see? And does that trick get you to stop scrolling and watch?...
Contrary to what the content creator fantasized would happen, the advertisement in front of the advertisement didn't fool me. I looked at it as little more than clutter that got in the way of me viewing what I wanted to view, so I just moved on without viewing what I had wanted to view.
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It never ceases to amaze me how the content creation types think that annoying their indented audience increases viewership.
There's a well known technique when teaching people something: you first tell them what you are going to teach them, then you go through the teaching process, then you tell them what they have just learned. This helps people retain the information better than just the middle bit alone. It's used in all kinds of classroom teaching and other legit applications.
Pre-movie ads now do this. I don't remember the exact words because I try to tune them out, but it goes kinda like:
"In the next segment, you will see how Toyota cars can make your life better, how Pepsi can quench your thirst, and how Microsoft products can enrich your online life."
followed by 15 minutes of Toyota, Pepsi, and Microsoft commercials
followed by, "You have seen how your life is improved with Microsoft tablets, how Toyota is working to give you better mobility in your world, etc"
It's designed specifically to embed this shit even further into your mind. I find this almost intolerably irritating, and avoid theaters now because of it. All advertising is manipulation on some level, but this has taken it to an unacceptable level, IMHO.