Eye Spy Teh Suck
Hey, congratulations to whatever agency put together the marketing campaign for the film The Eye, and by “agency,” I mean whatever shirt-tail relation of some producer got nepotted right into parting some of uncle’s picture from some of its money (and don’t forget to get uncle that special set of titanium golf clubs he wanted, or that introduction to some of the hot chicks down at your community college, whichever he wanted for the deal).
I mean it’s bad enough we start with this on the small, non-trailer playing banner you get on reputable sites like MySpace.com (thanks to froggiegirl again for her suggestion and please to think I am part of MySpace):
Sure, the misspellings caught my ever-loving QA eyes (and, quite honestly, Ms. Froggiegirl’s as well because she once worked with me and understands misspellings and lack of a serial comma are not just bad, they’re evil). The banner resolved itself to spelling itself correctly after a while, after it had my attention:
And so I got your suck-for-attention sort of scheme, and I wouldn’t have posted about it except I went to the Web site and I found out just how far they carried the suck for attention motif.
The main page of the site is the trailer, a link to buy tickets, and a link to enter the site. The link to buy tickets spawns a smaller window that links to places where you can buy tickets:
So tell me why you made me click through your banner ad to buy tickets on your site when you’re just going to send me to another site? Oh, I guess for the metrics, so you can prove to Uncle Harvey that the interactive budget brought eyeballs, so to speak.
Now, the other link on the trailer itself and the only one that is available if you click Close Trailer is an Enter Site link:
Both the Enter Site and Enter The Site links lead you to this page:
That’s what’s in the site. That image, playing a song. You can turn the song off; if you don’t, it starts over when you mouse into it again.
Great googly moogly, what the devil is the user supposed to do with that? Is there supposed to be some meat on that site somewhere? Maybe some interactivity that either is behind schedule (and in danger of missing the movie entirely as it runs for three weeks and goes to DVD) or maybe it’s elsewhere on the site and the main page links to the wrong place.
Whatever it is, telling people to click to your film’s Web site and having this gratuitous waste of hard drive space and bandwidth dished out to the interested people isn’t going to sell them on your movie and is going to help to actually turn them off to movies sites entirely.
As a rising tide lifts all boats, so true is the maxim that Scuttling your own boat spectacularly makes all potential passengers reluctant to travel by sea. Granted, it’s not short and pithy, so I don’t expect it to get traction or appear in a political speech any time soon. But that’s beside the point.
I don’t go to many movie Web sites, and this one is not convincing me to go to them earnestly in the future. As sources of material, though…. When the amateurs are the way, QA will play. Shorter, pithier, but won’t get traction either.