This weekend saw the annual arrival of the Italian Festival on Hertel Avenue in Buffalo. I strolled among the crowd on Saturday, exploring the three blocks or so that were closed to traffic and filled with vendors. Not having any money to spend on carnival food or games or anything else that such an event has to offer, I attended for the sake of enjoying exposure to the crowd and whatever other free entertainment there was to offer, such as a stage set up for music at the far end of the festival. In that respect, I actually came away feeling relatively satisfied.
After I took one pass of the event, I stopped to sit on the concrete windowsill of a building just beside the music tent. A band was playing when I arrived in their vicinity, and my ears gradually perked up to the sound. I listened passively to the end of one song, heard the singer talk to the crowd for a moment and realized I was enjoying the music, so much so that when the last song of the set began after that, I drifted closer, leaning on the railings separating the venue from the sidewalk, so that I could look keenly on the performance, tap my foot, and generally show some appreciation for the enjoyment they were offering me.
The singer took a long time talking to the crowd afterward, and I was interested to know who on Earth I had been listening to, so I could keep watch for them in other contexts. The companion I had been walking with, who has a little money, even expressed interest in purchasing a CD. Festival audio has a tendency to be imperfect and temperamental, so admittedly I couldn’t keep up with every word. In spite of that, I did hear the suggestions from the singer than the crowd like them on Facebook, the invitations to follow them on Twitter, the statement that they could be found on YouTube, where they upload a new video most every week. I heard a lot of earnest requests for online attention from their fans and would-be fans. What I didn’t hear was the band’s name. I’m sure they said it, but not all that clearly, and seemingly not more than once. The opportunities to repeat it were never exploited during the long listing of media in which we could follow the band.
This got to me to thinking about how social networking technology is impeding our concepts of good advertising and effective self-promotion. It strikes me as ironic that Facebook and the like has made most users obsessively interested in self-promotion, but only in the basest sense of the word, and the sense in which it takes remarkably little effort. For people like the singer for this band, the idea of promotion has been transferred almost entirely to the consumer. It’s rarely thought to be the job of the person seeking promotion to provide incentives for attention or to actively court a following. It is thought to be enough to simply invite that attention and that participation, and then to wait for it to serve the ends of promotion on its own.
The goal is to make things go viral, and to do that, all you have to do is pass the contagion on to one person who’s going to communicate it to a highly public environment. The job of the promoter, the agent, and the public relations man is increasingly being passed along to just a bunch of nameless observers. That can be enormously effective. You don’t have to pay anyone, and sometimes you get lucky. But that’s really all it is: luck. You’re much better off reaching for exposure through hard work. It seemed clear to me that the band I stumbled upon was working hard at their music. That will definitely get them some attention, but in this situation, they lost the opportunity to secure two long-term fans because they took it for granted that promotion occurs passively, and that once they’ve put out their product, it should sell itself, with the audience doing the legwork of promotion. But it’s not enough to show us that you’re good, you have to tell us where you come from, where you’re going, why you care, and above all else, who the hell you are.
I get the impression from the observation of this anonymous band and other relevant situations that an awful lot of people are coming to think of traditional advertising as being dead, of professional public relations people as being redundant. But that’s not so, and if it is, it shouldn’t be. Sure, the members of the audience who like you may carry you on to their friends, but skillful self-promotion can obtain the same from those who haven’t yet decided that they like you.
Showing posts with label entertainment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label entertainment. Show all posts
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Friday, March 11, 2011
Film Commentary: Rango
Given my child-like innocence, my admiration of Johnny Depp's acting career, and my tendency to be taken in by good marketing, I decided almost immediately after seeing the previews for it that I wanted to go to see Rango. I went to a showing with my friend last night, and about ten minutes into the film, when the title character found himself stranded in the desert looking down upon the plastic fish that he had considered his closest friend, and coming to terms with the loss of everything that had defined him up to that moment, my companion turned to me and inquired, "How is this a kid's movie?"
"Who says it is?" I answered.
Andrew O'Hehir at Salon wrote an article titled "Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation" in which he outlines the growing trend towards gearing animated films not only towards entertaining parents who are accompanying their children, but towards adults who might attend the film by themselves and for themselves. Certainly, that has always been in spite of the implicit understanding that these films are first and foremost for children. With Rango, however, I think the balance has tipped. Whereas the "children and family" genre has long been producing material that is fun for the whole family in the sense that it has roughly equal entertainment value for both children and adults, Rango, while still fitting that formula generally, seems to me to be geared primarily towards adults, with the intention of being equally entertaining to children as a secondary consideration.
I thoroughly enjoyed the film. As a matter of fact, if Rango is intended as a children's film, I expect that I shouldn't have related to it as closely as I did. But I think the major themes were artfully designed in just that way. They can be interpreted for children, or they can be read against the backdrop of adult experiences and understood in another way. The hero is presented in the opening scene as having no genuine sense of self, and he spends some moments daydreaming about the heroic roles he could play out for himself on stage. This provides a familiar point of connection for children, who simply have not determined what course their lives will take yet. But read differently, and in a way that I think becomes more appropriate as we come to know the character and his situations better, this film is not about the lizard as a child who is just finding his way in the world, but rather the lizard as a man who has come to face a crisis of identity and alienation.
Beyond that, the film is rife with biting social commentary, some of which actually stunned me as I watched the plot unfold. The story relies at times on dense metaphors, which can certainly be expected to fly right over the heads of children, and are likely to be difficult for even some adults to grasp. These do not hide deep within the story, either, but present themselves early and directly, as with the armadillo that Rango meets at the very beginning, who councils him on the quest to reach the other side of the road, which the armadillo has undertaken many times, Beckett-like, before being run over by a vehicle and starting back on the near side.
But after we are introduced to that conceptual dialogue, we are immediately thrown into a minute of Rango riding the currents of passing cars, bouncing among windshields, and entertaining children with perfectly cartoonish excitement. That is the way it is throughout the film. There is adult humor, reference to numerous films, depiction of people struggling through economic hardship, and spiritual visions, but all the while there is slapstick comedy, gunfights among a cast of animal characters, and flashy visuals. Amongst all of this, there is entertainment enough for children and adults, and for those who seek a cerebral experience at the movies as well as those looking to indulge in pure escapism.
As the cerebral sort, I enjoyed this movie enough to rate it four and a half stars, both on account of its thought-provoking content and its skillful balance of that content and the simple, immersive spectacle of children's entertainment.
"Who says it is?" I answered.
Andrew O'Hehir at Salon wrote an article titled "Rango and the Rise of Kidult-Oriented Animation" in which he outlines the growing trend towards gearing animated films not only towards entertaining parents who are accompanying their children, but towards adults who might attend the film by themselves and for themselves. Certainly, that has always been in spite of the implicit understanding that these films are first and foremost for children. With Rango, however, I think the balance has tipped. Whereas the "children and family" genre has long been producing material that is fun for the whole family in the sense that it has roughly equal entertainment value for both children and adults, Rango, while still fitting that formula generally, seems to me to be geared primarily towards adults, with the intention of being equally entertaining to children as a secondary consideration.
I thoroughly enjoyed the film. As a matter of fact, if Rango is intended as a children's film, I expect that I shouldn't have related to it as closely as I did. But I think the major themes were artfully designed in just that way. They can be interpreted for children, or they can be read against the backdrop of adult experiences and understood in another way. The hero is presented in the opening scene as having no genuine sense of self, and he spends some moments daydreaming about the heroic roles he could play out for himself on stage. This provides a familiar point of connection for children, who simply have not determined what course their lives will take yet. But read differently, and in a way that I think becomes more appropriate as we come to know the character and his situations better, this film is not about the lizard as a child who is just finding his way in the world, but rather the lizard as a man who has come to face a crisis of identity and alienation.
Beyond that, the film is rife with biting social commentary, some of which actually stunned me as I watched the plot unfold. The story relies at times on dense metaphors, which can certainly be expected to fly right over the heads of children, and are likely to be difficult for even some adults to grasp. These do not hide deep within the story, either, but present themselves early and directly, as with the armadillo that Rango meets at the very beginning, who councils him on the quest to reach the other side of the road, which the armadillo has undertaken many times, Beckett-like, before being run over by a vehicle and starting back on the near side.
But after we are introduced to that conceptual dialogue, we are immediately thrown into a minute of Rango riding the currents of passing cars, bouncing among windshields, and entertaining children with perfectly cartoonish excitement. That is the way it is throughout the film. There is adult humor, reference to numerous films, depiction of people struggling through economic hardship, and spiritual visions, but all the while there is slapstick comedy, gunfights among a cast of animal characters, and flashy visuals. Amongst all of this, there is entertainment enough for children and adults, and for those who seek a cerebral experience at the movies as well as those looking to indulge in pure escapism.
As the cerebral sort, I enjoyed this movie enough to rate it four and a half stars, both on account of its thought-provoking content and its skillful balance of that content and the simple, immersive spectacle of children's entertainment.
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