Is “reality advertising” really a good thing?
By Linda Forrest
I’m torn about Disney’s new “Let the Memories Begin” marketing initiative that utilizes real families’ photos and videos as a means to market their theme parks. Regular folk can upload their “memories” to be used royalty-free in any manner of marketing that Disney sees fit.
Full disclosure, I’m a Disney nut. By total coincidence, I may or may not be listening to the Walt Disney World soundtrack as I type this. My husband and I got married at Walt Disney World (no, Mickey didn’t perform the ceremony), and we travel to the Happiest Place on Earth as often as we can.
Like almost every other family that visits a Disney park, we come home with hundreds of vacation photos and videos of ourselves having a wonderful time, of our young son meeting his favourite characters, of the scenery and of events like the fireworks, parades and so on.
I definitely see the appeal from a consumer standpoint of having our pictures projected onto the castle, or to see our perfect wedding recognized as the ideal, to have our son’s beautiful smile as he met Mickey posted near and far for everyone to see. But from a professional standpoint, I fear the trend of “reality advertising” will not stand the marketing industry in good stead over the long term.
As a self-proclaimed casualty of the music industry, where copyright interests (read: revenue streams) in sound recordings fell by the wayside as illegal downloading became more pervasive, and as a watcher of all things media, where my television is filled with either unpaid or modestly rewarded people I could also likely see at the grocery store, I perceive this shift to a more “socialized” advertising approach setting a dangerous trend.
The fact that a large company with multi-billion dollar revenue has effectively found a way to circumvent spending money on creative content will, in my opinion, not bode well for the marketing companies that provide similar services to clients that most likely don’t have the same budgets as Disney.
This predicament reminds me of a fairly recent construct in the music business, that of the 360-degree contract that incorporates many of the revenue-generating activities of artists – artist management, recording, touring and merchandising – under one contract managed by one company. When the Madonnas and Robbie Williams’ of the world signed the first of these contracts, it scared the bejeezus out of me and I was convinced that the trickle down of this would negatively impact artists.
While I give full marks to the enterprising companies that came up with this approach, predominantly record companies that saw their revenues shrinking while artists continued to make money from live performances and t-shirt sales and discovered a way to get their hands into those pots, it’s the artists who suffer the financial repercussions. Who cares if Madonna’s giving up a percentage of her t-shirt sales when she’s got money to burn; it’s when the contract becomes the industry norm covering independent artists who rely on that t-shirt money to fill their gas tanks or their hungry bellies that the truly insidious nature of the agreement is realized. Williams himself later went on the record saying that his signing of this sort of agreement had been a bad idea that stifled him creatively. In fact, he compared his contractual obligations, ones that ran counter to his artistic integrity, to “slavery.” Harsh words indeed.
In the marketing and advertising realm, the internal teams at Disney or their multi-million dollar agency will not feel a pinch. But when mom-and-pop shops start to decide they can take these matters into their own hands rather than deal with professionals, our industry will suffer and we’ll have yet another obstruction to eliminate on our road to selling our services.
