Another Movie Idea

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If you’ve ever passed a movie shoot, I’m sure you found it as impossible as I have to find out what movie they were actually filming. What is the reason for this? Why all the self-important secrecy? I think this might be another “but we’ve always done it this way.”

To me, this where you create a meaningful relationship between the product and the consumer: “Oh hey, this is the preview for that movie we watched them shoot down the street.” Capturing people’s attention when they are actually interested is a lot easier than when they are trying to do something else. If I were in charge, every truck, every shirt and every camera would have the movie title plastered all over it. But that of course is how Hollywood works–they’d rather pay a half-million dollars for a radio ad than stencil the transportation outside the shoot.

Marketing is about teasing and then reaffirming–hearing people talk and then seeing a lengthy article about it a few months later or seeing a celebrity wearing a logo and then finally identifying it with a brand when you see it in a store. And it is the inability to see things long term–“we need privacy, we can’t have fans bothering us“–that holds people back from doing the little things that add up to a bankable connection.

Written by Ryan Holiday
Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ego Is The Enemy, and other books about marketing, culture, and the human condition. His work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as Grammy Award winning musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world. He lives in Austin, Texas.