Marketing Pilgrim

With Facebook the Movie: aka The Social Network hitting theaters this weekend it got me thinking about social media and movie marketing. I am not alone in this, as a quick Google search turned up a recent AdAge article that pretty much said what I was thinking, “Why Do Most Movie Websites Suck?”

I’m a huge movie lover, but I’ve hardly ever met an official website I didn’t hate. I always assumed it was because they’re generally full of flash and graphics with very little text. I’m a writer, I like reading. Chris Thilk, the author of the AdAge article agreed with me and he took it one step further. It’s not just that official websites are bad, it’s that the Facebook pages are better.

Tips for Reaching & Engaging the Elusive Millennial may sound like an Animal Planet special, but it’s actually a very informative webinar from Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer. Millennials are those that came of age in the 2000′s, but for the purpose of the study, they’re defined as the 18 – 34 year-old group.

The biggest factor that differentiates this group from those that went before it, is that these people were born techies. They came into adulthood with cell phones in hand, laptops in their backpacks and an almost innate disdain for print mediums. They are 72 million strong and they have 200 billion dollars to spend. This is an audience you want to please and eMarketer’s presentation has some tips in that regard.

Sometimes we find a news story that’s just not sexy. There’s not much to say about it, but we’d be amiss if we didn’t let you know about it.

This is one of those times: Google has opened up its goo.gl URL shortener for everyone to use.

It takes really long URLs:

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/09/courts-disagree-on-expectation -of-privacy-regarding-social-media.html

and shortens them

goo.gl/UZhO

And, that’s about it. Oh, it does have some cool analytics–but so does just about every other URL shortener out there:

Lastly, you can insert your own conspiracy theory about how Google will use goo.gl to sap PageRank or spy on you.

Warning: This is a rant.

Since this blog is read by many Internet marketing influencers I just have to say one thing while I might have your attention for a sentence or two. This is not a new subject matter but it deserves a rant because it is still lurking about and getting worse. Here it goes.

Forcing a 30 second video ad (or 15 seconds for that matter) in between the content I am seeking and myself is bad practice. I know I don’t represent everyone on the planet but what makes your ad, which is slickly produced etc etc, any better than the old pop up ads that used to litter the Internet and render many a good site unusable? Oh and it if you have changed the terminology or the term pop-up no longer applies, that’s just semantics. A pop up, is a pop up, is a pop up. Period.

According to Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, we here in the US are so self –absorbed that we do whatever we want and really don’t pay attention anyway to the details like pricing of products etc. Unfortunately, his remarks weren’t too far from the truth. The remarks were also an incredibly stupid thing for a CEO to say but that’s for another post.

Another apparent habit of us here in the US is embellishment. Really?!?!? In a larger sense we tend to distort things especially when we pass them on to others. Ever play that silly kid game of ‘telephone’ with adults? Start a message at one end of a line of 25 folks and see what it has morphed into when it is passed along one person at a time. Embellish? Distort? Nah, not us. Not in the land of ‘experts’, ‘mavens’, ‘ninjas’ and other distorted reality self proclaimed titles? Really?!?!?!?