Deep Jive Interests

Political maunderings aside, the Weekly Standard Makes a point: despite the overwhelming internet buzz hype, Snakes on a Plane was no Blair Witch.

I have to admit that once I heard about Snakes on a Plane, I just couldn’t explain all of the on-line hoopla It didn’t make any sense to me.

Even though my own tastes are a little blue collar, even I had a hard time getting into a 3rd rate story line that my 13 year old self would have a hard time getting stoked about.

Snakes? On a Plane? WTF is cool about that?

Well regardless of my own prejudices, there was certainly a heck of a lot of off-line PR related to the on-line buzzmachine — propagated mostly through a single blog, but there have been others, and a helluva lot of fan-made fanfare.

Now, a lot of the buzz reminded of the buzz around the Blair Witch. Which made sense to me — although the buzz mechanism was different. Like Snakes on a Plane, Blair Witch had a trivial marketing budget. However, unlike Snakes on a Plane, the Blair Witch deliberately created a website which capitalized on the substance of the movie which blurred the line between reality and fiction (the movie).

However, UNLIKE the Blair Witch, Snakes on a Plane has made pretty miserable business. 15 million in its opening weekend. Box office tallies come monday, I’m sure will be even more anemic.

What’s the lesson learned? Why didn’t the buzz translate to off-screen dollars?

There are three reasons I think:

1. For buzz marketing to work, you’ll still need a genuinely good product: C-grade movie fodder that is meant direct-to-video just isn’t going to cut it. Marketing tells people about a product; for the buzz to sustain itself, the people who try it have to continue to spread the message. Well, once reviewers and the people started watching the movie, the buzz died right there. Without a great product, all the marketing in the world does is hasten a bad product’s demise.

2. Even if the product is good, at least appeal to a niche audience: Sometimes bad movies succeed in spite of themselves — and movies are no exception. Think Star Wars Episode I. Its an extreme example of a movie succeeding in spite of the fact … well, even I’m willing to admit it wasn’t that good. But, it had a niche audience to plug itself into who are willing to support a movie, a franchise, despite its quality. Science Fiction, Romance, Horror — if enough staple elements are included in the movie it can succeed in spite of itself. Snakes on a Plane? There’s no genre to support it … yet.

3. Sometimes the Youtube niche isn’t strong enough … yet. Perhaps the real story here is that in spite of the bad campy movie, and in spite of the lack of a good niche to support it — it kind of did. The Internet niche. There were real fans who spent real time making real (but sometimes bad) movies and promoted the buzz. In SPITE of all that, the movie only took in $15M in its debut weekend. If we assume they all went out and did their duty and watched the movie, their actual dollar impact was … to put it politely … impotent. Now, that’s 2006. With the rise of broadband, its hard to know what their impact will be in the future.

Buzz is buzz. And once its started, it can create a whirlwind of marketing that can swirl larger, faster and more out of control than the original product can support.

Bottom line: The base of fans that created the buzz in the first place wasn’t enough to create a big enough impact themselves in terms of dollar figures — and once the buzz took off, it wasn’t enough to support a movie that was a campy cliche’d thriller to begin with.

The Blair Witch had a similar start — but the difference maker was that there was enough that was different and interesting with the movie (was it real? was it fake? [It was all shot in a cam-corder style]) AND it plugged into an existing niche audience (fans) that it justified the buzz

… all the way to the bank.

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