“Boy, this thing is shredding my insides!” – Krusty the Klown
“Uh, Krusty, that wasn’t a metal one, that was a regular Krusty-O.” – Sideshow Mel
“It’s poison.” – Krusty the Klown
Fair Warning: Semi-hinged rant below.
Back in January, a few days before the Super Bowl, I wrote a post making fun of the Coke ad that was going to run during the game. Shortly thereafter, an e-mail appeared from one of those hip, edgy Web 2.0 marketing firms hoping to get us to help them promote the ad. Shortly-er thereafter, a second e-mail showed up apologizing for sending the first. The guy who sent it had finally had time to read the post and figure out that our site was unlikely to help with anything but getting yelled at by his boss. (That he thought he could “recall” e-mails sent to a gmail.com address remains funny all these months later.) Mistakes happen, especially in the frenzied marketing days before the biggest event on the American television calendar.
Hurry, however, cannot excuse all faults; yesterday we got a press release from another hip, edgy Web 2.0 marketing firm. They build Facebook pages and Flash promo games for movies and teevee shows, and they were hoping we’d help them market the upcoming Season 13 home video release. If I were smarter, or just feeling noble, I would have summarily deleted it; mentioning it in any way just plays into their fiendish trap. But I couldn’t help myself, there was too much delicious marketing evil on display, so I decided to make myself part of their hypocrisy and play their little game.
Most of the press release was the usual blah blah: here’s why the show’s great, here’s when you can buy this marvelous set, here are the episode titles. More interesting is what’s not there: Sam Simon. The Soviet style airbrushing of Simon out of the history of the show continues:
“The Simpsons” is a Gracie Films Production in association with 20th Century Fox Television. James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, and Al Jean are the executive producers.
I haven’t seen any of Season 13 in a long time, but I’m pretty sure Simon is still listed as an Executive Producer. IMDB sure thinks so, but nevermind.
Included with the press release was a link to their website. But this was no ordinary link, you needed a user name and an extremely convoluted password to access it. And what did I find when I got through the security? The press release! It was the exact same text as the e-mail, both on the page itself, and available as a downloadable Word .doc file. The only other thing on the needlessly password protected page was the image of Ralph from the Season 13 cover, which I could view directly or download as a 304kb zip file. The zip file contained a higher resolution version, unzipped it was a whopping 324kb. Way to save bandwidth.
To be fair, there was a little bit of actual information contained in all the blather. However, it’s not likely to make anyone spend the extra $10 on Blu-ray:
The Blu-ray release also includes specially created menus with additional animation that does not appear on the DVD.
Holy shit! It’s got different menus that have additional animation! That’s sure worth my ten dollars (sarcasm detector explodes). I understand that taking advantage of the rich and the ignorant is a good way to make scratch, but still. They’re charging ten bucks for animated menus, that’s just unseemly.
Speaking of the rich and the ignorant, expensive menu animations are not the only means to take advantage of them. Should you find yourself at Comic-Con in two weeks, you can buy the set in the crappy plastic head package . . . a whole month before it gets to stores. Something tells me that at the convention they’ll be charging the full fifty dollar “suggested retail” price for such a historic opportunity, even though you can pre-order it on Amazon for just a little over thirty. Marvel at how they pitch what amounts to a 66% markup:
As an added bonus, they will also receive a collectible limited edition lithograph as a gift-with-purchase.
This is a masterful Marketspeak sentence. Look at it:
“added bonus” – nevermind that it’s not exactly clear what the original bonus is, unless you consider cheap, shoddy packaging a bonus; also, note the alliteration at the beginning
“also receive” – not just “receive”, but “also receive”, subtly implying that you’re really getting a lot of stuff; such a good deal!
“collectible limited edition” – Now, “collectible” and “limited edition” basically mean the same thing, so why would you put two words that mean the same thing in a row? To cover your bases and reinforce the concept that you (yes you!) are getting something valuable that only special people like you (yes you!) can get.
“lithograph” – a fancy word for “drawing”, verbiage costs nothing, but adding something decent to the package might shave precious pennies off the net profit; fuck those collector geeks anyway, they’ll buy anything
“gift-with-purchase” – Mr. Webster, if you please: “gift”, noun. “something voluntarily transferred by one person to another without compensation” A “gift-with-purchase” is an oxymoron, but calling it a “gift” makes it seem cuddlier than what it really is: you paying extra money for chintzy crap and the perceived social status of having something only several thousand other people have.
To finishing things off, and like any good sales pitch, this hip, edgy Web 2.0 press release contains a call to action, a little hint at the glory and prizes that can be mine if I help them promote this shitty, shitty product. Bold in the original:
For further information including review copy requests and possible giveaway or interview opportunities, please contact [E-mail address]
Best wishes,
Mmmm, free “possible giveaway” swag. The “Best wishes” part also slays me, especially considering that it wasn’t followed by a person’s name.
I’ve got to say though, the sophisticated predation of a modern marketing campaign is a frighteningly impressive beast, especially when something like this press release invites you to fondle the hindquarters and marvel at the teeth. While it’s true that all they’re really doing is wringing every last penny out of television episodes that are nearly a decade old (and crappy ones at that), their methods demonstrate extremely keen anthropology. They have a precise faculty of human weakness, and they know the most tender places to strike.
It isn’t easy to sell things at a grotesque markup, but Comic-con, where collectors predominate and everyone’s mind is already swirling from the big noises and shiny things, is clearly the place to do it. No one with a titch more brains than money will pay extra for a standard definition television show on Blu-ray, but there’s plenty of coin to be made marketing to unconsidered purchases. Whether it’s bought as a gift or not, the kneejerk human reflex of expensive=better will add undetermined millions to the bottom line.
My plaintive internet keening will have no measurable effect on their revenue, and there’s no chance that an honest outline of their disingenuous sales tactics will cause a significant number of people to reject them. Even whether or not documenting their greed and immunity to shame is worth doing is an open question. But futility and pointlessness have never been impediments to this website. Rot in hell, Zombie Simpsons. May your discs and collector’s editions be left in middens with the rest of pop culture’s cruelest mistakes.
That was a great analysis of marketing jargon. Hurray, I learned!