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The Creation of "Fan" Sites 189

Posted by Hemos from the false-pr-is-who's-friend dept.
jmoore writes "Nothing new that movie makers will do anything to make money from their movies. However, what about making false fan sites to boost a movies image? I couldn't belive it, but sadly it dosen't suprise me much. how depressing." The hype Blair Witch got, as the article points out made the movie industry understand how powerful "grass roots" really is. Reminds me of the Levi jeans pages modeled on the "I kiss you!" guy that people thought were real as well. Ah, marketing.
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The Creation of "Fan" Sites More

The Creation of "Fan" Sites

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  • From what I understood, the MPAA is going apeshit trying to get people to take down real fan sites. Why are they wasting their time doing this, while wasting even more time putting up obviously fake ones that nobody really cares about? Sounds like some stupid ideas dreamed up by some clueless 65 year old executive.

  • All the "Blair Witch", in the long term, proved was that "Grass Roots" couldn't do it more than once (re: the major flop that BWP2 was).

    Fake "fan" sites might used to artificially create a Grass Roots campaign because they know a real one will never happen again. Soon, the people will come to realize this, the studios will stop and try something new...and go on suing everybody in site for "Intellectual" property when intelligence wasn't even remotely used to make the crap they shove down our throats in the first place.

  • What? You're telling me that "Hollywood marketers" are lying to me???

    But seriously, according to the article, it really does help to have Internet hype:

    The success of the 1999 horror movie "The Blair Witch Project" is testament to the Internet's hype potential. The film industry was blindsided by the appearance of block-long lines of ticket-holders who had gotten hooked on the film through its Web site. The movie was made for about $1 million and became one of the most successful independent films in history, grossing $128 million in its first five weeks.

    And I thought everyone saw that movie for the artistry!
  • The Church of Scientology made fake fan sites for "Battlefield Earth"? (man that was a funny movie)

    --
  • In the members section, $4.99 per month for unlimited downloads.

    Deal of the day: e-meters, two for the price of one, while stocks last.
  • ..Fake your fans.. The thing is though, if this works, isn't it because there is a fan base out there? or potential for one?

    I mean is a movie like the Mexican [aboutfx.com] really going to make money just on marketing hype alone? I mean, this wouldn't work right? People dont like to go see crap..

    Oh.. Wait.. Nevermind..

  • My question is how do you explain Steve Gutenberg, he happened before the Internet....
  • What does "grass roots" have to do with the second Blair Witch? The sequal was more like a normal movie, with its T.V. teasers and such, rather than the first, with poster of missing children being passed out a college campuses...

  • I finally understand why there are so many Linux sites on the internet. Think about it people: If programmers are working for FREE then where does all your donation money go??
  • The Levi jeans websites Hemos refers to were these sites that Levi Jeans did for some reason... I think they're still up: http://www.rubberburner.com [rubberburner.com] and http://www.supergreg.com [supergreg.com]... I'm sure there were more.

    -------
  • >The I Kiss You guy was real. Asswipe.

    I believe the story was referring to stuff like Rubber Burner [rubberburner.com] and Super Greg [supergreg.com].

    I don't think these were the Levis spots in particular, but these DID turn out to be fakes to promote something or another. Very subtle, since there are no products mentioned...

    -l
  • although i agree, dont single out the movies on this one. mandy moores management created some, as im sure did a lot of other bands. did you guys ever see the one pud from fuckedcompany made for himself? it used to be at pud.com but he took it down. kind of making fun of the whole thing im going to start making fansites for websites. "this page keeps you up to date on what is up to date on my site"


    NEWS: cloning, genome, privacy, surveillance, and more! [silicongod.com]

  • Ah! (Score:1)

    by jpm242 ( 202316 )
    So that's how that movie "Star Wars" got so popular!

    J:P
  • You mean the I Kiss You guy wasn't real?

    Damn. And I was hoping to go visit him and stay his house.
  • Hasn't this been going on for a while? I seem to recall a fan site for American Pie before it came out that was proven to be marketing. I also think I remember a DiVX(the watch-once DVDs, not the codec) fansite that was also faked.
  • In this vein, we should create a goase .cx website to hype up the simplistic beauty of this enlightening masterpiece.

    Then the proprietor could grant free adverizing space on goatse, to the MPAA

    Seripusly, though. as cynical as this sounds, it is nothing new. Somewhere, way inside the lesat obsure link on the site, you might find a statement that "this is an ad" But if not, so what?! IT'S A FAN SITE

    What artca$heer isn't a fan of his work?

    How many dustcovers on how many novels, have high critical praise from critics that you may not have heard of? How many of those are verifiably unsolicited?
  • When all my friends went and saw the Blair Witch project, and were trying to convince me that it was a true story, and that the movie was true footage. This really did put a more "scary" spin on the movie for my friends.. but oh well.. they were doped by lying marketers, and I shove it in their faces everyday hehe :)

    ~Marshall

    -------------------
  • I don't know about anyone else but I didn't see the Blair Witch because of fan sites, I saw it because of the SiFi "Documentary" on it. Which I still think is the best marketing scheme I've ever seen.

  • Looks like this is old news [slashdot.org].

  • It will never stop... (Score:3)

    by jhaberman ( 246905 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @12:42PM (#349090)

    Hmmmm... Anyone else think that we are getting closer and closer to EVERYTHING being about marketing? We aren't allowed to make up our own minds any more. We can't have opinions. If we do, we are obviously not the 'target audience' they're going for. Movies are dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. TV shows are only concerned about their 'share'. Niche markets are a thing of the past. Even on the web. Content sites are going down the tubes... or they are bought/run by huge companies posing as fans.

    *sigh*

    Doesn't anyone else with a brain in their head find this disappointing?

    Jason

  • This is of course not to say that Hemos ISN'T drunk, of course... He still could be drunk and talking about rubberburner and supergreg, I suppose.

    -------
  • ...is a good one. But it's more of a tribute to Star Trek fan pages; it wasn't ever intended to appear genuine. Same way the movie was kind of a tribute to Trek fans.
    --
    Assume that there are valid arguments against your position.
  • I love the fact that this article keeps describing the web page designer as a "computer whiz". It really does wonders for the credibility of the author...
  • I had heard (though I have no substantiation for it just now) that the Blair Witch fansite hype was also partially manufactured by the film's creators.

    Anyone have links or more info?

    OK,
    - B
    --

  • Wired News did an article [wired.com] on this a while back.

    -Christian

  • I don't know about the rest of you but for $10,000.00 a week to deliberately make a poor looking site....
    I don't care how bad the movie is... It's not like they have to make you watch it!

    LR

  • The stonecutters [geocities.com].

  • That's your story? (Score:3)

    by dangermouse ( 2242 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @12:46PM (#349098) Homepage

    I couldn't belive it, but sadly it dosen't suprise me much.

    ... and you're sticking to it?

  • Fake Fandom (Score:3)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <(imipak) (at) (yahoo.com)> on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @12:48PM (#349099) Homepage Journal
    In the long term, it's going to be, ummm, counter-productive. Not cos it's stupid (although it is), but because the people the movie directors and studios are trying to impress, the guys with money, are going to perceive the popularity of the movie as LOWER than it really is.

    Why's this? Easy. These guys do simple statistics to model situations. If you've a million fan sites, each claiming to have a million hits/day, then that's a million times a million people who should have paid, right?

    Since the cinema intake is going to only be slightly more (if there's any change at all), the ratio of ticket sales to potential customers is going to drop faster than Mir on Penguin Mints.

    Result? The guys with money are going to invest in other companies. They're not going to put money in what they see as a looser.

    In the end, the best way to capitalize on the movie market is to make decent movies with scripts that require in excess of double-digit IQs and hormone levels below the toxic threshold.

  • I didn't see Blair Witch specifically because it was so hyped before it came out. At first when I heard about it, I thought, "well that sounds cool". But once all the hype started coming I figured it probably wouldn't be worth my time. And I'm glad I never saw it, from what my friends told me 'bout it. So the internet hype did nothing for me. I'm much more prone to go see something that actually is proven to be a good flik (by word of mouth from co-workers and friends) than to rush into believing a bunch of hype from those pushing their product. If I based my decisions on hype, I'd be buying every last piece of M$ software I could get my hands on! :)

  • For entertainment companies marketing to a generation raised on the Internet--teenagers and twentysomethings who regularly comb the Web--good buzz reigns supreme.
    Unless that company paying you pulls its IPO and gets sucked under NASDAQ's nasty grip of things this year. Wonderous how for some instances media is one stop short of saying the Internet is dead.

    It's a simple process: Tap into any of the big search engines, such as Yahoo or Ask Jeeves, type in the name of a favorite star or movie, and a world of possibilities pops up that includes promotional sites, movie reviews, recent articles, chat rooms and fan sites.
    Last time I did a search on any one particular star, I had to sift through about 1gajillion porn links

    Because fans crave "real" or unfiltered dialogue with other fans, these unofficial sites are popular and powerful. It is a culture that is ripe for manipulation.
    This isn't neccessarily news though, maybe since someone actually wrote up an article about it. Fact of the matter is, most advertising agencies have marketers who profile when, where, and how to market to people by ethnicity, social status, etc. When was the last time you saw an ad for Malt Liquor or Birth Control on Rodeo Drive? Theres nothing new to what the studios are doing. Sure its immoral in a sense, but its no better than some marketer chosing one neighborhood because more "bruthas" live there.

    Sil the movie [antioffline.com]
  • The earliest related thing that I can think of is the hiring of people to shout (agreement) at a speech. Or sending people out into a town to promote a play (without admiting that they were hired to do so) This is just an application of an old technique to the internet.
    -CrackElf
  • In the case of the Blair Witch, this was a clever tactic - it was part of a marketing campaign specifically intended to build up intrigue. Many people went into the theater unsure of whether the movie was based on a true story. It was a creative way to draw attention to a small, independant film. To use this sort of misdircection on a regular basis is just sort of scummy though. With BW, it was expected that everyone would be let in on the joke at the end - the movie makers came right out and told everyone what they had done by the time the film hit big. If they did that here, it would ruin their credibility, and they don't want that.
  • I worked for a company called Full Moon Interactive Group [fullmoon.com] and I remember that before I started working there, they were hired to do a bunch of fake websites for Sega. This was stated openly on the old fmig.com portfolio pages (anyone with archive.org access find their old pages?), but they don't seem to be up any more. This was around early '98 or so. Could've been Saturn fan sites or something ... I can't remember exactly and I apologize for that.

  • Good catch. Looks like Hemos is drunk after all.

    -------
  • that the person that posted the story was Hemos. It could be some marketing genius's evil scheme to boost excitement over new films. Damn them!! Damn them all to hell!!!

  • Exactly. I've been making poor looking sites now for years, for absolutly nothing.

    -------

  • Too bad it works... (Score:4)

    by cowboy junkie ( 35926 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @12:55PM (#349109) Homepage
    Regardless of whether it's a fan site or the New York Times, too many folks accept information without question. Having been on the journalist side of things, it's scary to know just how easy it is to mold the facts to support just about any view. Just find an expert or two that agree with your supposition and suddenly you have news. Of course that's only when you aren't regurgitating the endless stream of PR/marketing crapola that gets thrown at you to 'inform' you of what's newsworthy.
  • As someone theat trying to build a fansite for new TV show [thelonegunmen.net] i have to say it sounds like it was probably a bad investment on the studio's part.

    Even though my site is dedicated to a show with an extremely high geek quotient, I haven't been able to get my daily hit count above the low double digits. The only way I see this working is if they paid the major search engines and web directories for preferred placement, or if they got links to the site planted in online media with the (also likely paid) cooperation of the media outlet (which we know happens).

    Alternatively, they could draw people in (as was aparently the case with American Pie) by using material supposedly obtained surrepticiously from insiders, but that in fact was provided directly by the film's marketing Dept.

  • Real fan sites live until show takes off. (Score:3)

    by Bender Unit 22 ( 216955 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @12:56PM (#349111) Journal
    It seems to me that many times fan sites gets left alone until a certain point when the show(or whatever) takes off. Until then, they don't seem to mind too much about fan sites providing pictures, video/audio clips. But once it hits the big bucks fortune and fame, the fan sites gets shut down faster than you can say /.
    So in my mind, the "companies" are already playing on this, which I think, sucks.
    We have seen it a lot of times where faithful fans were treated as criminals as soon as the "company" don't need their free advertising and trolling.
    --------
  • I couldn't find it but there was a Story several months ago on Salon about Christina Aguilera producers' marketing strategy of creating buzz about Aguilera on newsgroups and irc chat rooms even before her first record was released.

    Seems like it worked pretty well.

  • How pityfull of you to pretend to be my friend, if you are so depressed to have friend, go see cyborg_monkey, he'll talk to anybody.
    --
  • This question is far more baffling than the meaning of life.
  • Create pupet-socket fan sites just works for tv series, a movie stay around for some time then just loose momentum. It's so much more intelligent use fake fans in a chat room or forum, where people go to talk about "what's going on". Can we assume o'reilly mantain a room full of monkeys to type citations from their books?
  • Stewart Copeland (of later "Police" Fame) used to write anomynous letters to London music mags bragging about the incredible talent of this new up and coming drummer (himself)

    A good chunk of promotion is tooting your own horn, whether you like to admit it or not. Why should it be any different in the modern day. It's all grand and ideal to assume every grassroots movement you see is done by selfless volunteers, but it's almost never that way. Deal with it.
  • Blair Witch was much less a good movie, and much more a fun, novel experience. BW2 was neither.
  • The fact that it's fake doesn't make it any less hilarious. It makes it all the more brilliant. The other one they did about the guy who breaks stuff busted my shit up (and I knew it was fake at the time)...

    I heard it wasn't Levis but some other company... the name slips my mind, but it was big in the 80s... Lee? Someone like that.

    W

    -------------------

  • I'm really surprised everybody missed out on Travis Latke's Galaxy Quest [galaxyquest.com].

    I'm not slow, but when I went back and found it'd been co-opted by Amazon for awhile, I started thinking "Saaaaay, Travis musta turned pro!"

  • The thing to remember is, dishonesty is not new :)
  • Not real?! He invitated [saunalahti.fi] me to come stay his house, too! We were going to take fotograf, playing ping-pong and talk about sex.

    Guess I'll have to travel many country by myself now. *sigh*

  • This is just a setup for a Simpsons joke, isn't it?

    "Who keeps down the electric car?
    Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
    We Doooooo! We Doooooooo!"

  • Decouple from the hype train. (Score:4)

    by isaac ( 2852 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @01:07PM (#349126)
    Real fan sites depress me. Why would a rational human being devote dozens of hours to fawning over a piece of commercial entertainment? Does knowing what the stars ate from the craft-services table make the movie better? No. Does Jennifer Lopez sound better when you know who she's dating? No. Will knowing the exact date and hour of the premiere of the next Star Wars movie make it suck any less? No.

    A plea to the fawning fanboys - get a life! Direct your energies to something useful. If your skill is in documenting minutia, apply it to an educational or reference site. If you like writing fan-fiction, try creating your own characters and settings for once. If you're good with image/video editing, or with 3d software, work on an original indie creation (or go pro), instead of reenacting the Phantom Menace with South Park characters.

    There's a place for sampling existing works and distorting them, but the final product should be original. Think Negativland instead of Pat Boone or Puff Daddy.

    Enough ranting for now,
    -Isaac

  • Hardly new (Heat.net, levi.com) (Score:4)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @01:08PM (#349128) Homepage
    Back in 1997, we made fan sites and protest sites, for and against "Cyberdiversion" for Heat.net. The fact that we were doing it got more [suck.com] press [zdnet.com] than the sites themselves ever did...

    The funny thing is that one of the sites, "Mothers Against Cyberdiversion" has since been quoted and incorporated into culture [google.com] several years later by people who had no idea that it was nothing more than a reverse-psychology guerilla marketing effort.

    A few years later I was the webmaster for levi.com and its associated domains. While at that time we didn't do any direct misdirection, we would create one-off rough-cut promo sites, including one for redline, designed by the folks at superbad [superbad.com]. I left before the age of Mahir, and so didn't have anything to do with those...

    Kevin Fox
    --
  • I caught this one from watching the simpsons the other night: whatbadgerseat.com [whatbadgerseat.com].

    Provided by the Simpson's folks to be an actual site that Lisa went to one evening to find out what badgers eat. I think it was episode BABF20, but there's no capsule at snpp.com.

    While it's not exactly the same thing, as it's pretty obvious that this one is in cahoots with the Simpson's creators, it is still the same kind of guerrila marketing plan. I found it pretty entertaining.

  • fake fansite slashcode.

    You just enter in some default values:

    • Name of the thing you are promoting
    • some images, sound clips, other content
    Then the engine out generate meaningless babble and fake postings, and all kinds of other BS
  • put up their own fake fan sites, and then sue the real ones out of existence?
  • Has been doing this for some time now. Harry has whored himself out so often that he's even getting cameos in movies now.

  • One of my freinds once had a personal web site. It had some images copyrighted by Nintendo. Nintendo's lawyers sent him a bark letter. He was allowed to continue, but only if he put up a bunch of stuff promoting Pokemon. What else could he do but comply?

    Nintendo basicly got advertising for the cost of a bark letter.


    ------

  • Re:marketing drones (Score:3)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @01:19PM (#349141) Homepage Journal
    Last time I did a search on any one particular star, I had to sift through about 1gajillion porn links...

    It works better if you don't look for porn stars...

  • The future of the Internet:

    A collection of marketing tools and world wide hype sites, with spam filling the spaces in between.

    If we are not careful, that is all that will be left.

  • You are correct. It was Lee Jeans, during their Buddy Lee campaign. Buddy Lee challenged Super Greg to a DJ-off. Buddy Lee won.
  • It's my understanding that the Beatles used to pay high school girls to scream and faint in the crowd at concerts and other public appearances. What's the big difference?
  • Through the hard work that I put into a half-life fan site several years ago, I gained a lot of skills at everything from HTML to JavaScript to PHP and Perl, plus a smattering of SQL. That experience helped land me a great summer job, and now I'm looking forward to a career at web design after college graduation in three months.

    So, even though it took a lot of time and is now in the bit bucket, I learned a lot from the time spent and it definately made me into a better web site designer :)

    - Kallahat
  • Althought I agree with you that people need to be more original, the fan domain has its own air of creativity. Like those that write fan fiction who's only tie to its related domain is the fact it may take place in the same "Universe". Like writing a story about your own mutant character in the X-Men universe (except S-I which are usually god-awful) or a story about a common person in a superhero universe and how they react to events around them (A La TCP).

  • What you say!! (Score:3)

    by Lord Omlette ( 124579 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @01:37PM (#349160) Homepage
    You've never enjoyed something so much you wished you could be a part of it?
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057
  • Sites don't get high traffic volume from search engine hits. They get it for having content. A person might wander in once from a search engine, but unless there is something there worth reading, they won't come back and they won't tell their friends. Sometimes I find something new and interesting doing a search, but most of the sites I visit regularly (slashdot, pvponline, penny-arcade, sluggy, to name a few) are all sites I heard about directly from people I know. They all feature unique content that keeps me coming back to see what is new. And I recommend them to friends that I think would like them. Your site happens to have no original content, is mostly full of ads and links to show us how much we can spend at Amazon, and gave me no reason to ever come back or tell my friends about it. Fan sites can get a lot of attention, but only if the devoted fan spends some time puting useful or interesting information on the site, and spends time updating it regularly instead of trying to increase his hit count by complaining about it at other sites.

  • You've never enjoyed something so much you wished you could be a part of it?

    Of course I have. I just don't think that writing a fan site or fan fiction makes me involved in the creative process for the original work, or that it makes me a creator or artist at all. At best, it would make me an imitator, and an unpaid marketroid. I demand pounds for my shilling, if you know what I mean.

    -Isaac

  • Blair Witch expose (Score:4)

    by L-Train8 ( 70991 ) <Matthew_Hawk.hotmail@com> on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @02:10PM (#349179) Homepage Journal
    Salon had an article on astro-turf fan sites, with a particular focus on Blair Witch. It was here [salon.com]. It talks about web buzz and Ain't it Cool News and how that stuff impacts movies.

    In part it reads:
    "The "Blair Witch Project" fan sites deploy similarly suspicious language. The creators of The Blair Witch Project Fanatic's Guide, for example, tell site visitors, "We're just very dedicated fans," and until recently offered suggestions on how other fans might help promote the movie: "Buy TBWP Stock at the Hollywood Stock Exchange! Rank TBWP at the Internet Movie Database! Rank TBWP at Ain't It Cool News!"

    But the creators of the site, Abigail Marceluk and Eric Alan Ivins, seem to be more than average fans. They appeared in the Sci-Fi Channel special "Curse of the Blair Witch," and the Rough Cut site links them to the film's back story: "A bit of trivia: Abigail and Eric are the two anthropology students who discover the three film students' 'lost' footage."

  • It's that whole meme [memepool.com] thing. Gutenberg is a meme. Kinda like Judge Reinhold.

  • Re:Not hardly... (Score:3)

    by localman ( 111171 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @02:13PM (#349182) Homepage
    All the "Blair Witch", in the long term, proved was that "Grass Roots" couldn't do it more than once (re: the major flop that BWP2 was).

    That doesn't make any sense because BW2 wasn't grass roots at all. Rather, it was exactly what we've come to expect from Hollywood. Maybe it's impossible for a sequel to be grass roots by it's very nature, but in any case BW2 certainly wasn't. It discarded every single element that made the first film special. All BW2 shows is that Artisan didn't know how to properly cash in on grass roots support.

  • An amusing variation.... (Score:3)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @02:16PM (#349185) Homepage Journal
    ESPN created a phony webcam site [kathicam.com], featuring a camgirl who spends all her time talking about how ESPN sucks.

    __________________

  • Grytpype? What is that from, a disused rubbish tip on Filthmuck-On-Ooze? :D

    (see the cover of Absolutely Free... funny how we're ignoring modern media and bantering madly away with 30 and 40 year old references...)

  • The Warner Bros. studio has tried to get Harry Potter fan sites taken down [theregister.co.uk]. Warner Bros. is currently backing off on this.

    Fake fan sites are eerily reminiscent of Bruce Schneier's Semantic Attacks [counterpane.com], except that the movie industry is doing it so damn clumsily, and in public.

    I agree that fake fan sites are dopey, and won't work. I mean, what attracted Joe Sixpack to The Internet in 1996 and 1997? Was it slick, pre-digested Corporate Ad Collateral? No just "No", but "Hell, NO". What attracts people to The Internet is what other individuals have put out there, whether it be Harry Potter fan sites, Hollywood Bitchslap movie reviews, or AmIHotOrNot. The current upper leadership of mass media outlets just doesn't get it.

  • Do I care from whence content I want comes from? No. Do I care if the content I want to look at is from a "phony" fan site? No. Will a fan site ever sway my opinion one way or the other about a film or get me all "hyped" about something? No.

    In conclusion: Who cares? How could anyone feel ripped off about a fake fan site? The home page for Galaxy Quest was done in the style of a fan site and was truly hilarious.

    -----

  • What's wrong with having an . . . uhm. . . exboritant interest in something? All right, being down right obsessive. Yes, I understand that it be rather annoying to those of you who are so far above all of us lowly ones who have no life of our own *all said jokingly* I sit on both sides of the fence. I don't understand my friends' obsessions with Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, and the like, yet I love Gundam Wing.

    Sometimes you find that one thing that simply captures your interest and by creating a fanfic, by redoing it with your own character ideas you are opening the doors of your own imagination to create your own masterpiece. I am a part time author, but I cannot write an original mecha sci-fi like GW. It doesn't make me any less of a person because I fell in love with a character from another show and want to make up my own stories about him. That's why doujinshi [professional fanfics, moreorless] is so popular in Japan! We like to take the characters out of their world and discover what they would do and how they would react to the world of our own creation. I am a proponent of using one's own imagination, but, at the same time, I love to share my ideas about known characters. People already know their characteristics then and don't have to get to know brand new ones. Yes, it's like discovering new friends, but sometimes I prefer my old friends thank you very much. ;)

    Anyways, I will now stop ranting as well.

  • I think you may be missing the point. The goal of the fake fansites isn't to impress the money-men at all, it's to impress potential fans.

    The idea is that because the site appears to belong to someone just like the site's visitors, large numbers of those vistors will say, "hey, I can relate to this person, and they think [foo] is cool - I should think it's cool too, and spend money on it!".

    The fake site doesn't generate fake numbers for the money-men, it generates real fans for the product.

  • If a fan site has a name with a trademark/copyright in it and isn't asking for free legal help to fight off movie company attempts to take the name, then it is obviously a fake.
  • To take advantage of the AYBABTU [amiallyourbaseornot.com] fad, people are quickly trying to take advantage of the marketing potential of it.

    Hence, they've made All Your Brand Are Belong to Us [allyourbrand.org] which mostly has a repeating theme, but some are still quite interesting...

    You always have to wonder why grass roots always turns into cash roots.. *cough*woodstock*cough*

    --
    Gonzo Granzeau

  • Human beings are social animals. So they tend to enjoy celebrating the things that they have in common. Like it or not, interest in pop culture phenomenons like Star Wars provides a common context for millions of people to chat at the water cooler, post a message on a newsgroup, or run a fansite.

    Of course, you're right about the common context. I personally don't like it, though. I don't like the fact that today's "common contexts" in much of the world are properties to be owned. It's the very fact that people build obsessive communities around pop entertainment that I find distressing. This tendency is, I feel, one worth cautioning against, insofar as it

    • provides a disincentive to the production of new works.
    • promotes a culture in which a corporate machine is looked to as the sole generator of new characters and universes.
    • requires consumption, rather than creation, as a barrier to entry.
    And original subject matter is hardly a prerequisite for art to be "legitimate". If all the artists through history had "created their own characters and settings" instead of reproducing the same old scenes from the bible, the world would be a much poorer place.

    Borrowing common themes from the Bible is one thing, adding new "fan-fic" books to the Bible is quite another. (A funny idea, though!)

    I'm not a believer in "legitimacy tests" for art, I just call things as I see them. And I see fan-sites as a big fat waste of human intelligence. I'll still defend the rights of their creators to create them - I just won't get too bent out of shape when the corporate owners of the seminal works these sites are built around decide to co-opt them.

    -Isaac

  • Yes, it's very dissapointing. But remember this: businesses don't do anything that doesn't affect their bottom line (for the most part). if marketing becomes increasingly annoying, there will be a certain backlash from certain groups. Look at Snapple for example. They built a (formerly) billion-dollar drink empire simply based on the fact that it was the true Anti-Cola (or so they made it seem to consumers).

    This is all bad, but not nearly as bad as you make it seem.

  • Except that's not really marketing, except in the broadest sense. Yeah, sure, they mentioned the site, but it's pretty clear that it's not actually a site explaining what badgers really eat (at least not in depth, I have no clue whether badgers actually eat woodpeckers), it doesn't look like they're making gobs of money (yeah, there's some banner ads, but last time I checked no one was getting rich off banner ads) and the site itself isn't promoting anything, really.

    Except maybe not feeding your badger slurpees.

  • Open source with adverts in the comments. Coupon codes in the logs. This manpage brought to you by...
    --
  • It would explain all those Cmdr Taco fanclub sites.
  • Mod that up. Maybe offtopic, but pretty funny.

    Hrm. How do you know I'm not just a marketing droid, trying to promote something by suggesting the up-mod?
    --

  • Re:It will never stop... (Score:5)

    by Sarcasmooo! ( 267601 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @03:52PM (#349219)
    Well I agree whole-heartedly, but most people probably think I'm a little to extreme in my reasons. See, personally, I find it appalling that businesses are even allowed to take this sort of aggressive stance. It ticks me off just to see commercials that are directly targetting children in a manipulative 'buy-me-to-fit-in-at-school' sort of way. I don't believe that corporations are people, and I don't believe they have rights that people have. The people who comprise those companies, of course, have every right that anyone else does. Even the founding fathers understood this. Before the early 1900's, and before commercialization became the norm, it was illegal for corporations to give any money to politicians. I don't have a quote offhand, but all the way back to the 1700's Benjamin Franklin himself would talk about how restrictions on money, and restrictions on ownership of media (that existed before the Telecommunications Act of 1996), were paramount to preserving a democracy. Otherwise a business like his own newspaper could manipulate the government and monopolize the only medium through which people could ever hear about it.

    But that's what what we have now [cjr.org], and it got that way through compromise after compromise, supposedly in the name of freedom and capitalism. The problem is that the public can't compete with the mechanized efficiency of big business. Microsoft lobbyists are formed up on capitol hill pushing UCITA [slashdot.org] while most Americans are at home watching MicroSoft NBC's latest incitefull coverage of some tear-jerking tale of loss and eventual triumph over something or other.

    Enough already. These multinational corporations do business in places where the constitution means nothing, and human rights are non-existent. They're not our friends, they're not human beings with common sense, or even morals. Obviously they've proven my point; a business is operated by individuals, but it has no conscience, it acts as a machine would to achieve maximum efficiency. Anyone who's familiar with the term 'soft money' or 'corporate welfare' should understand what we're dealing with these days. The 'American People' and 'Corporate America' can't exist as equals, when the second of the two is dominant in it's very nature. Corporate America has to take the subserviant role, and not because the bill of rights is subjective -- but because when they don't, the rights of the public and the rights of the same people at the helm of Corporate America, get squelched.


    /vent

  • A-yep. (Score:2)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    In fact, I read about that on Slashdot. Hmm.
  • In the USA, FCC and FTC regulations require a publicly displayed message to contain some clear link to the financial sources that created it. In the case of advertisements, the product shown is benefitting and is clearly (assuming the marketing folks have done their job) identified. On more vauge topics such as religion or politics the creator is required to be announced, "this message paid for by the committee to reelect..."

    Penalties for this sort of thing may be severe. Now, IANAL, but it occurs to me that movie producers and studios may have deeper than average pockets, and that if you could set some law students to tracking these things down, gathering evidence, and then present it to a law firm, you might be able to find grounds for damages or a class action lawsuit.

    It's the American dream in action. Besides, who believes anything they read on the internet, anyways?

  • Doesn't anyone else with a brain in their head find this disappointing?

    Nope. I find it empowering. Look at it this way: if you didn't matter, why would companies spend so much time and money trying to sucker you into buying their stuff?

    zo.

  • Re:Not hardly... (Score:3)

    by jafac ( 1449 ) on Wednesday March 21, 2001 @04:28PM (#349224) Homepage
    there was a BWP2?
  • in political science lingo, this is called an "astroturf" movement, for obvious reasons.

    perhaps one of the more interesting cases in recent history is Microsofts' infamous attempt (this was circa 1998 or so) at astroturfing...they sent out documents to partners across the usa urging that they (and their employees) send letters of support to their congressmen for "freedom, the american way and microsoft" and that "all care should be taken such that the letters appear to be spontaneous messages of support from disinterested parties".

    naturally, word leaked out and the "great innovator" had egg on their face again.


  • What the astroturfers seem to misunderstand is the fact that grass roots support follows lots of people loving the product... it doesn't generate lots of people loving the product.

    Due to this small causal falicy ("fan sites create buzz" vs. "lots of buzz leads to fan sites"), marketers are often fooled into thinking that astroturfing can create the illusion of lots of people excited about their crappy film or software, which will surely lead to lots of people actually excited... In the end, they always learn, the hard way, that lots of sites saying "Wow! $CRAPPYMOVIE is the best film I've ever seent!!!" fool nobody, and make the company look like complete idiots.

    Balmer and Gates probably still blush at the occational chuckle years after they launced their astroturfing efforts. They learned their lesson, and now only buy off mainstream media to pimp their software (i.e., ZDnet).

  • Right. And I'm not going. But fan sites are part of people's lives, and I don't recall any of them inviting Warner Bros legal assfucks into their lives.

    The fact is that on the net, it's easy for those fucking parasites to "do something" to justify their bloated salaries.

    What crosses the line between a legitimate fan site and a commercial enterprise treading on the copyrights of others? If you aren't even trying to answer this question, then you are an unmitigated evil as far as the future is concerned.

    But the quest to recrate a fake version of the things they are trying to destroy is like murdering Indians to clear the way for filming Dances with Wolves. It would be pathetic if it werent' the mother of all assgas straight from Satan's sphincter. Having been near the stuff, I can honestly say it's not the execs that are the problem so much as the toadies surrounding them and flattering them with grandoise fantasies of their power and wisdom who are wrecking culture for everyone.

    And it's $10 in parts of Manhattan now.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • Absolutely ... (Score:3)

    by AftanGustur ( 7715 ) on Thursday March 22, 2001 @12:10AM (#349240) Homepage


    You hit the nail right on it's head. Everything is going to be about the market. The market and commerce are likely to be officially above everything in a few years.

    Ant it's all going to change this summer when WTO will rule on Brazil's ability to manufacture cheap AIDS drugs for it's patients.

    That will realy be the turning point, if WTO will rule in favour of the drug companies, then we will have it "officially" that the companies ability to make profit comes first, absolutely first. Even before human lives.


    --
    Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?


  • They are not addressing *you* as an individual. But rather as a part of a group of dumb consumers.

    Realy, they couldn't care less if you were hit by a truch at this instance or blown to bits by a carbomb. If it doesn't show on their statistics it doesn't matter.

    Getting a *empowering* feeling from this, can not be called anything else than naive.
    --
    Why pay for drugs when you can get Linux for free ?

  • Quick post without reading, as I read it in this mornings paper...

    To me, it seems to underline the Advantage advertisers have that essentially corrupts the free discourse of information between netizens. I argued this with 'loyal opposition' co-workers today. My point: this represents (and you gotta read the article to understand how sleazy this tactic really is) a total rip-off of people's creativity in a deceptful marketing scheme by the big corporations. On Charlie Rose last night, Michael Eisner claimed that the service he provided (he is an ardent hands-on-the-creative-process man) was the aggregate of directors, writers, actors, etc, and that if people on the internet were allowed to trade movies unchecked they would destroy that gathering of talent. "There would be talent, but it would be [dissonant crap]." But if Disney were to imitate Joe Blow's fan website, aren't they denying the creative capacity inherent in all those marketeers?

    But the net result of this is a further reduction in the credibility of websites. There is a reason that magazines put the word "Advertisement" on top and bottom of those ads that read like articles. They want to retain credibility. So if this continues, the internet, already a place of dubious ancestry, will suffer a little more as people will have to decide further (just like in their spam mail) whether to believe the source or not.

    I think this degrades the value of the entire internet experience. But then again, I don't visit movie fan sites much.

    More to the point. Big business wants to have its cake and eat it, too. You can't link to their site, or comment on their 'content', but they can spend big bux and totally copy your fan site and prey on all your potential visitors.
  • "It's the very fact that people build obsessive communities around pop entertainment that I find distressing"

    pop=popular=whatever most people like.
    entertainment=that which is enjoyable.

    You don't like the fact that people build communities around what most people enjoy? Just because it's what is enjoyed by most people?

    That seems elitist for the sake of it.
    _____
  • A plea to the fawning fanboys - get a life!

    If you start singing "Mr. Tambourine Man", I'm outta here....
    /.

  • I was joking.

    I heard about the movie, and didn't go see it (as I suspect many people also did not).

    I was making the point that the astroturf hype surrounding the first movie was a case of "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"

    IOW - it's not the kind of thing that's going to work as a long term marketing strategy, and that this phenomenon will likely fade away. It's 15 minutes are already up.

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