I’m sure you’re dying to know what I thought, so here’s the short version: I liked Crystal Skull well enough, but I didn’t love it. I had some reservations, and some things I wanted to take a couple of days to think about before I posted anything.
While you wait for the longer review — because I know everyone out there in InternetLand is waiting with bated breath for my humble opinion of a movie you’ve probably all seen by now anyway — allow me to entertain you with the following video clip, relayed to me this morning by Brian Greenberg:
People are weird…
Update: Doh! BoingBoing is reporting that this video is a viral marketing campaign from an agency that has the LucasArts games account. And as it so happens, there is an Indiana Jones LEGO game coming out in a couple of weeks to tie in with the release of Crystal Skull. So… it looks like I got taken, kids, used against my will and without my knowledge to spread the word about a product I will see no profit from myself and have no interest in helping to promote. And I have to admit, I’m feeling pretty damn annoyed about that.
In the interest of full disclosure, my own employer has been involved in creating several viral campaigns, but personally, I just don’t “get” this sort of marketing. It seems to me that there’s something sneaky about it, like you’re trying to fool people into listening to a pitch, and very often the pitch is so subtle that the commercial message doesn’t come through anyhow. If you have to really dig into the background of a video clip or a web site to find out there’s something being sold there, how can you say that your message is being effectively delivered? How many people really exert that kind of effort? And isn’t there a potential backlash against the product that’s being advertised when people do realize that that funny clip they’ve been passing around to their friends is just another freakin’ ad? I know I’d feel a little bit scammed and a hell of a lot less charitable toward Product X. Just like I’m feeling right now about freakin’ Lego video games…
If in fact that wasn’t their car, how do you explain this to the owner??? I would have probably left the giant boulder and just run.
I’m guessing these guys did something similar… 😉
Oops…
Didn’t mean to be a marketing shill – I was just as used as you were. I say we all boycott Lego video games, as we’ve likely been implicitly doing for many years now…
That works for me! I will not buy any more of the Lego video games I’ve not been buying, well, ever… 🙂
Seriously, though, no worries. It was still a funny video. I just find the concept of these viral things… unsettling. Like I said, it seems sneaky to me, and I dislike sneaks. But I probably think too much about this stuff…