No Amount of Advertising can Turn a Turkey into Gold

Today's Report on Business Magazine features an article on film producer, Denise Di Novi. Denise has produced a number of films I truly enjoyed - but last year she lent herself to a truly stinky piece of cheese, Catwoman.

The film cost over $135 million to make and market, but had box office returns of $82 million worldwide. Nine out of ten film critics panned the movie. Over on the Internet Movie Database, Catwoman has a rating of 3.4/10. A resounding bomb.

The article suggests that Di Novi has learned from Catwoman that 80% of the focus should be on the marketing of a film; especially the one-to-one contact that the internet and word of mouth can provide. "I didn't deal with it," Di Novi said, "because I thought it wasn't valid. But it is."

The article mentions how Ain't it Cool News and other online websites were critical prior to the film, and Di Novi's mistake was not currying their favour or communicating with them.

Interesting, because I seem to recall this interview that Di Novi gave during the production, clearly trying to curry favour with the fans. During that interview, Di Novi says, "You know, listen, I make my movies for the audience, not for myself, so I always listen to what fans say, whether they're online or at screenings or whatever. I always care."

Truth is, the filmakers had chosen to dismiss any and all naysayers, online or off, as insignificant. There were reports that anyone who rated the film as poor were excluded from the focus groups. Online buzz was noted, but ignored because a survey had led the studio to believe that only 1% of people base their filmgoing decisions on what they read on websites. Safely ignoring the online criticisms as being a 'splinter fan group' Di Novi says "we thought, 'We're fine'. But then the NY and LA Times quoted the chat room of one high school kid in Austin. One kid in Austin, Texas, is now read by millions of people; it's mind-boggling."

So, what does Di Novi think of the fans following the film's underwhelming performance?

"I hate to say it, but I think a lot of those fans are misogynistic or threatened by women. These are guys who sit in their apartments and eat candy bars and feel rejected by women."

I see.
It's not the abandonment of the character's history, not the horrendous script, nor poor direction and half-hearted acting that lead to the film's failure. It's the woman hating comic book readers. Di Novi backs this theory up by pointing to the poor box office performance of Elektra, and slim profits of the second Lara Croft film.

"[those films failed], I think because those guys are not ready for sexual, powerful female icons."

Okay, if I was deeply tied to a project that lost $50 million, I might be a little bitter as well. But it's clear to me that neither Di Novi, nor the article's author are seeing the real lessons. The lesson isn't to focus your marketing online. The lesson is to *listen* to your customers. Actually and truly listen. The lesson is to have something of substance and value to offer those customers.. If all you have to offer your customers is lip-service, don't expect to have customers for long.

A Simple Question

A question to companies considering a ban on their employees blogging. Why would you expect us to trust your company, if you're unable to trust the employees that compose your own company?

This article is for registered users only

Steve Outing writes on Poynteronline about his difficulties logging in to the San Jose Mercury News site to read an article.

We've all had the frustration of following a link only to be smacked in the face with a 'please login or register to read this article' page. I get that the idea is to obtain valuable demographic info; demographic info that the site publishers use to demonstrate the value of advertising on their site.

But is the info provided of any use? Surely the site owners realize that any demographic info collected in this manner is suspect at best. If people aren't using fake info to breeze past the registrations process, they're bound to be using services such as www.bugmenot.com.

The current registration walls may collect demographics on 100% of the visitors, but all of the info collected is suspect. If you were to link to a reader survey after providing the article they were looking for, maybe only one out of a dozen will respond, but the info you collect will be entirely correct.

Will every website be a blog?

Recent discussion on the HPCA mail list has been focused on the question, 'will blogs replace websites?' Media Orchard and B.L. Ochman have also recently opined that this may be a trend to come.

I hope not.

Don't get me wrong - I do think that blogs are an incredibly useful communications tool. There really aren't many cases where I would recommend that a client not blog. However, save for a few instances, I don't think the blog is the most useful thing to lead with on a web site.

As Seth Godin recently discussed out at Blogon 2005, the problem with a blog is that the first thing you see upon visiting a blog is that days post. Not your best post. Not your most effective introduction. Just today's post. Kate Trgovac points out, if today's post isn't your best post - what are the chances of your keeping your new visitor? Do you have a hope in heck of converting them from a visitor to a customer?

Think about it. Do you want your first encounter in a restaurant to be the host welcoming you and showing to your seat, or the chef walking over and telling you the difference between fresh and spoilt meat? When you're stepping into Best Buy, do you expect to hear 'Welcome to Best Buy', or should one of the staff run over and begin to tell you about the new television from Sony? When you step into a lawyer's office for the first time, does he ask you about your particular case details or does he start off by telling you a funny story about a balif he knows?

As important as it is to have a conversation, as important as it is to build relationships through communication, it's just as important to begin with a proper introduction.

Random Playlist Killed the Radio Star

Radio station 96.1 Max-FM has shown its talent the door and set the playlist to 'random'. As they state in their press release, "While the 'big guys' play the same old 200 songs over and over again, we hope you can give us a few minutes to hear what it sounds like when 96.1 MAX-FM plays over 1800 different songs."

While I question a Clear Channel station trying to pass themselves off as not being one of the 'big guys', I do think it's an interesting long tail approach to radio, and one that will likely pay off for the station. In the short time that I've listened to their online stream, I've heard 'I Can't Wait' by Nu Shooz, 'I Touch Myself' by Divinyls, and 'Light My Fire' by the Doors.

Comics for Personal Productivity

Dave Gray, in his blog, points out an interesting use of comics as communication: personal productivity.

Avi Solomon has been using comics to review his life, identify common patterns and plan future events. Avi is using his 'life storyboard' in a more philisophical and retrospective manner, but it's easy to see that such a system could easily be applied in place of a to-do list or personal planner. No need to throw out your present planner. The D*I*Y Planner site already has a template available.

If you're a visual learner, it's clear the advantage of a comic-based planner as opposed to the typical lists and bullet pointed action items.

a truth gap

An excellent post by James Cherkoff discusses the gap that often occurs between the company message and the reality discussed in the blogosphere, and how this gap can spin off into spontaneous consumer campaigns.

Feed aggregators and improved search tools amplify and accelerate the power of word of mouth. The trend is becoming all too predictable. One consumer’s complaint becomes a stream of complaints which then becomes a full-fledged campaign which then hits the traditional media channels, and within days an expensive marketing campaign is completely undermined.

Best way to prevent the gap is not to have one. Tell the truth and tell it well.

Grassroots Capitalism

Two years ago, I blogged about social activist group Adbuster's move to manufacture shoes.

It's been over 10,000 pairs of shoes later and Adbuster's 'Blackspot' line of shoes offer both a sneaker and an industrial styled boot. But what makes the difference between these and other shoes is that the entire thrust of the company is to do no harm.

The shoes are manufactured in a Portuguese factory, where the starting pay is 35% above the country's minimum wage and the workers are treated well. The shoes are made from organic hemp, processed naturally without the use of chemicals. The sneaker is 70% biodegradable whereas the boot has a sole made from recovered car tires. If you visit the Blackspot sneaker website, they're quite upfront about what the costs of the shoes are, and where the money goes.

Just under $12US of every Blackspot boot sold goes to the worker. Contrast this to Nike where the average cost of wages per shoe is around $2.75US, and - as accounted by their own corporate social responsibility reports - up to 50% of the audited contracted companies are paying below the legal minimum wage.

As mentioned in my original post on the subject, it's great to see an activist group actually stepping up and providing us with a solution while bringing attention to the problem.

But what I find most interesting about the Adbuster venture, is that they're extending stakeholder status to their customers. When you purchase a pair of their shoes, you become a voting shareholder. For all the companies and organizations that pay lip service to the customer being number one, here is a company that actually is doing it. Granting the customer the right to vote on how the profits of the company are used and the price points for future products. Imagine the sudden improvement and focus on customer service, if at any point a majority of customers had the ability to fire company management.

Blog Policies: Focus on the People, Not the Platform

Mike Manuel on his blog Media Guerrilla hits the nail on the head when he asks, "Why are we creating corporate policies that are based on platforms, when we should be creating policies that are based on behaviors?"

I am a leaf on the wind...

I caught Serenity over the weekend and as I expected, it was a good film. If you enjoy science-fiction, it's a must watch. The film should go over well with the action crowd, and there's enough meat to Whedon's story that even the art-house crowd can find enough to discuss in the philosophy of the film (a nice review of said philosophy of the film on the Reason website - spoilers, so don't read unless you've seen the film or don't care).

That said, the film is not burning up the boxoffice as I'd initially predicted it might. I was certainly encountering a fair bit of online buzz regarding the film, the critics have almost one and all given the film a thumbs up and the hardcore fans were certainly evangelised and preaching. But over the first two weeks of the film's release, the total box office is just under $20 million, making it likely the film will just break even. I'd thought it would be a case study of 'word of mouse' marketing gone well, but it may end up being a fair example of objects in the blogosphere are not as big as they may appear.

Of course, in this year of stinky-cheese-plots and box-office bombs, just breaking even is no mean feat, though something as cleverly scripted and well acted as Serenity deserves to pull in more than the Dukes of Hazzard film, imho. It's a shame that studios don't disclose their DVD sales figures, as the DVD box set for FireFly, the television series that spawned the movie, has been in the top ten at Amazon consistantly since the film's opening. Who knows - maybe the film truly is a success; as a means of generating more lucrative DVD sales.

PR needs PR

While there's a lot of interesting tidbits in the results of Edelman and Technorati's survey of Bloggers, what immediately stuck out for me were the results for questions 9 and 10.

Question nine asks, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to trust a message if it is sent to you from a PR firm? The average response was 4.6 out of 10. Question ten asks the same question, but instead the message is directly from a company. The average response was 5.5 out of 10.

Less people trust the Public Relations message than any other voice in a company. The voice of a guy on the line, or the front desk receptionist, or Ted in the mailroom all hold more water than the voice of the PR department. Am I alone in thinking this is a serious, serious issue for the profession?

NASA uses Comics as Communication

Dr. Marc Hairston and Dr. Mary Urquhart at the Universtity of Texas wanted to explain to grade-school students a NASA mission to study the Earth's ionosphere. So how do you explain to kids what the ionosphere and why the study of it is important in a way that's going to interest them?

Dr. Hairston and Dr. Urquhart decided to enlist Erik Lervold, an arts student from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and together they produced a comic. The comic tells the story of CINDI, an android girl who chases down robot dogs in space. It soon becomes clear that the robot dogs are an analogy for the ionosphere, and that CINDI is the satellite that NASA is using to study these particles. What a great way to introduce a difficult concept.

The comic is available as a free download from the University of Texas web site.

Google, if you're listening...

Have you ever had a tune that you just could not identify? I'd long wanted a copy of Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, but not knowing what it was called was unable to get a copy. Only by chance did I read a review of a Danny Elfman track which raised Khachaturian's name. Once I had a name, it was but a few minutes to find and purchase an MP3. There's a tune that was used by Showcase during a promotion of their Halloween lineup, that I've been trying to identify for years. The promo featured a happy animated bat swaying back and forth while this bubbly tune plays. I even went so far as to email the station in hopes of learning the name of that tune, but to no avail.

Lyric searches often help me find and identify some song I may have heard on the radio, but if the song is just music - no words - I'm stuck. What I would love is for a way to search sound. Let me hum a tune into my computer mic and then spit back at me the most likely songs to match.

But - until Google, or some other company, devise such a search tool, I'm left wondering just what the heck is the name of this song?!?

The Spider in the Library

A young man was cleaning in the library when a spider scuttled out from one of the shelves giving him a fright. This was not the first time a spider had jumped out at him from the dark shadows of the library, but he was bound and determined that it would be the last. He went to the elder librarian and said, "You've worked here all your life and are very wise. Do you know what to do about these blasted spiders?"

The librarian pulled a great tome off of the shelves and hefted it over to the young man. "This book", said the wise, old librarian, "contains all the world's knowledge on the arachnid. Whatever question you have on the creatures is surely answered within."

The young man thanked the elder librarian and assured him that the book was just what he needed. And from that day forward, the young man would use that book to squash any spider that crossed his path.

- - -

The internet is an incredible tool for business to connect with customers. Yet, whenever I read of something like the Cillit Bang fake blogger/comment fiasco, I can't help but think the tool is being horribly misapplied.

Dollars for Pixels

This one falls under the 'why the heck didn't I think of that' category.

There is a web page that is selling adspace by the pixel. At a cost of one dollar per pixel, and a typical screen containing one million pixels, www.milliondollarhomepage.com was born. Alex Tew created the site as a way to make some cash for University. For an investment of a couple days to build the site, and basic hosting fees, Alex figured what the heck.

"I thought this could be something crazy enough to work! Because I think people like crazy/quirky ideas. If this captures people's imaginations and people check out the site, then the pixels on the homepage will have value - and people will buy them," Alex wrote when the site launched.

The first week Alex made $900, which he admits was more than he expected. Imagine his surprise when just one month later he had sold $240,000 worth of adspace. Even if he never sells all of the pixels, Alex's University costs are covered and he's got a nice nest egg to start his life on.

Several dozen 'copy-cat' sites have launched with varying degrees of success.

Pixels for dollars. And to think, here I am trying to get by selling the letter 'O' for a nickle.

It's all in how you tell it...

Every now and then, I like to go digging through the shelves of the video store to see if there's some gem I've missed. This weekend I came across a delightful feel-good comedy about a writer and a little boy. Watch the trailer and tell me this doesn't look like a lovely Nora Ephron style flick.

But for the wee hours of the morning - I like a good scare. So I also grabbed a copy of this frightful romp. Check out the trailer here. Now that's frightening.

Okay - so if you've actually clicked on the links you'll get that the touching comedy is actually the Kubric adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Shining', and what seems to be an all-out creepy zombie flick is actually the musical West Side Story. Both mock trailers were entries in a competition held by the Association of Independent Crative Editors.

How you tell a story can be as important as the story itself. A little light-hearted music and the right cuts can make the Shining a comedy. Fast cuts, some leading text and a little overexposure can turn West Side Story into a worthy successor of Romero or Raimi.

The Late Chicken: a tale of poor customer service made worse

One of my favourite chicken joints has added online ordering to their delivery service.

Initially, I had great response to their service. The website was clear and easy to navigate. I placed an order for delivery at a specified time, and they were there within minutes. When I used their customer feedback form to tell them of my pleasure with their service, I got a response back within the hour. I would have held them up to anyone as an example of how to do online food service right. Emphasis on the words 'would have'.

One day, at the office, I got the craving for their chicken and special sauce, so I jumped onto their website and placed my order. In the past, I’d been using their option for scheduling a delivery time, ordering an hour or two in advance. But on this day it was almost lunch when the craving set in, so I opted for the regular delivery.

‘Your order is guaranteed to arrive in 40 minutes’ I was informed both on the website and in my email confirmation. And so I continued about my work and began to anticipate my chicken’s arrival. After 40 minutes passed and no delivery guy to be seen anywhere, I began to wonder what ‘guaranteed’ really meant. It didn’t say on the email confirmation. A quick perusal of their website turned up no information either.

After another five minutes passed, I emailed them to ask just what this guarantee was, because my chicken was now late.

The chicken finally arrived about 15-20 minutes late. “You’re a little late” I said to the driver. He agreed and told me there was some difficulty finding the place, then slid over the credit card receipt for me to sign. Guess ‘guaranteed’ was just a lot of huff and puff with nothing substantial to back it up. I signed.

It was only after my tasty chicken that I found attached to the bag my itemized receipt, at the bottom off which read ‘Delivery after 40 minutes, complimentary’.

I sent an email to the chicken place requesting that they not charge my credit card as the food was clearly late. With no response, I filled out their customer response form on the website, giving the details and again requesting they not charge me as per their policy. Whereas before the response was instant, all I received was silence. When my statement came in at month’s end, I found they’d gone ahead and made the charge.

The purpose of a ‘delived by or free’ policy is to highlight your attention to customer service. By having such a policy, you not only declare your intention of serving in a timely fashion, but you are willing to back it up with a complimentary meal if the promise is not met. Of course – if you don’t tell anyone about your policy, it’s not going to have any benefit. And if you then fail to follow through with your own promotion and renege on both your promise of timely delivery and a complimentary meal, you are actually going to harm your business far more than if you had made no promises at all. The $20 meal you quibble over is a drop in the bucket compared to the potential revenue from all my future meal orders – which are now directed towards the competition.

If you are offering a ‘delivered by or free’ promotion, then all of your delivery staff should be trained so that if they arrive late, the first thing they do is apologize for being late and inform that the meal is complimentary. There should be no haggling over time. There should be no excuses. Just a, ‘our apologies – please accept this meal free of charge’.

If you make a promise – keep it. If you’re unable to keep a promise, make amends.

Now – this is where the post should have ended. Only, the chicken place took my bad experience and made it worse.

After all my emails and attempts to contact them were ignored and my credit card was charged regardless, I chose to dispute the transaction. I provided the details to my credit card company and they put it into queue for investigation.

Yesterday I look up and there’s the delivery guy standing in front of my desk and he’s a little irate. He wants to know what my problem is that I’m challenging this payment. He tells me the chicken place is going to dock him for the cost of the meal and wants to know how that’s fair – what with him having kids to feed and making little more than minimum wage after paying for the cost of gas and maintenance on his car?

What's curious is that he is under the belief that I’m claiming I never ordered the meal and that he never obtained a signature. He had a copy of the bill in his hand to show me this. Apparently, if a driver fails to get the proper authorization for a credit card payment, the chicken place will dock their pay.

I explain to him that my only dispute is the chicken being late, and that the company policy is that a late chicken is a free chicken. He says that’s something all-together different because the company won’t dock a driver for a late delivery. I print off a copy of my emails to the company and he goes away satisfied.

Now I could see this kind of petty bone-headedness from management if this were some mom & pop chicken joint where they didn't know any better. But this is a national chain. How is it that the employees are given access to the name and address of people involved in a payment dispute? And what the heck is a national chain doing, trying to cheat one of their employees?

Does any of this inspire me to order take out from them again? Ever?
A shame, because I really, really like their chicken.