By Leo Valiquette
Say what you will about the mindset of Hollywood executives, they do like to reuse and recycle, even if the concept of “reduce” remains beyond their grasp.
We’ve seen the bigscreen reboots of such classics (I use that term loosely) as Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazard, Get Smart, The Fugitive, Bewitched and Shaft, with The A-Team on its way in 2009. It’s seen to be a safer bet to hang your hat on a franchise with some pedigree, than try to woo consumers with something entirely fresh and unique. Of course, there’s no shortage of examples where such caution has resulted in a bomb at the box office. Treading the line between attracting older consumers nostalgic for classic television and engaging younger consumers with something updated and current in the same package can be a risky proposition. As is always the case in product marketing, trying to be too many things to too many people can backfire.
All this to introduce the reboot of the mother of all franchises – Star Trek. Yes, I contend, it is bigger than Bond. All that’s left after this is the return of Gunsmoke.
After six television series (including the animated one) and 10 theatrical releases, the entire franchise is being rebooted with a new movie and new actors in the roles immortalized by the old series, anchored around the characters of Captain James T. Kirk, Dr. Leonard McCoy and Mr. Spock. They have dared to recast these pop culture icons with fresh faces who portray them a few years prior to the time period encompassed by the original TV series. The first trailers have just hit the Internet. This isn’t your daddy’s Star Trek. It’s fast, slick and the starship interior looks like it was designed by Apple engineers. There’s even a clip in the trailer where it looks like Spock loses his temper with Kirk and takes a swing at him. (Where’s the logic in that?)
The studio is obviously hoping to engage a younger audience, after a somewhat feeble response to the last television series and theatrical movie. It remains to be seen if they are beating a dead horse with an offering that will only serve to alienate the core fanbase that has stood by the franchise all these years. With the release date still far off in May 2009, the studio has lots of time to kick the marketing and promotion into high gear (no doubt with the affiliated merchandising to pad any softness in box office revenue).
Whatever the outcome and the general audience reaction to this franchise reboot, I think there will be interesting lessons learned about marketing and managing audience expectations when meddling with such an iconic brand, much like Coca-Cola’s experience with New Coke.
By Danny Sullivan
Over on TechCrunch yesterday, Michael Arrington hit back at those who have condemned his site and others for their policy of reporting on tech companies that are failing in the downturn.
Arrington states: “Reporting on layoffs or a dead company isn’t tabloid journalism. We do not take pleasure in seeing companies fail. But it’s inevitable that most will. And not only is it news, but readers have a right to know about it.”
And, while no self-respecting PR person wishes to see the details of their company’s demise being covered in the news, I have to support Arrington’s position on this.
Every day, I awake to the early business news on BBC radio and, for the past couple of months, every story has been filled with doom and gloom: companies and banks going to wall, layoffs, falling house prices, and so on. And yet I don’t expect the Beeb to ignore the facts of the downturn and to focus only on positive stories, so why should we expect anything different from a blog like TechCrunch?
As consumers of news, we expect the media (and bloggers) to bring us the important facts about the world we live in, and it just so happens that the business world is going through some major turmoil right now. No one likes the current situation, but facing up to reality is the only way companies will come through this successfully. News covers both the good and the bad, and we should not condemn the media for reporting on the uglier facts, just because we don’t feel like hearing them.
By Leo Valiquette
Most of us in Canada are no doubt familiar with that amusing commercial from Rogers about a fellow bragging to his friend about his new high-definition flatscreen television, despite the fact that the picture quality is horrible because he lacks the HD box for his television to display a true HD signal.
Well, this week my eight-year-old antique gave up the ghost. I had long ago decided that, should the day come, I would go with a Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD television. Within 24 hours of the old TV’s death, I had the new one on the wall.
Now, to set up the new TV, I simply connected my standard cable without any HD box, fully expecting to be confronted by god-awful picture quality that would be unbearable to watch.
But, to my utter amazement, the picture quality was at least as good as it was on my old TV. There was none of the blurry distortion dramatized in that Rogers commercial. Maybe I am not enjoying the full HD experience, but I certainly do not feel a pressing need to rush out and buy the HD box.
Granted, this is my personal experience after having the new TV set up for only an hour. Perhaps I am missing something.
But before I even got the TV home, I was in the electronics store shaking my head at a split screen comparison of the quality difference between a regular DVD picture and a high-definition Blu-ray disc picture. Again, there appeared to be a little exaggeration at work. Later at home, I played a standard DVD movie on my standard DVD player through the new LCD TV. When compared to the split-screen comparison I saw in the store, the picture quality was much closer to that of the Blu-ray than it was to the standard DVD as it was portrayed.
Comparisons can be a very effective means of selling buyers on the merits of your product or service, but in the bid to create that “wow” factor that allows your product to fly off the shelves, be cautious about massaging the facts. Your product may clearly be better than your competitor’s, or the status quo, but be careful about trying to present those advantages more dramatically than they really are. Sure, you may dupe the unsophisticated buyer, but, guaranteed, there are plenty of savvy people who will see through the gimmick and out you on — oh, I don’t know — a blog, perhaps?
By Francis Moran
“Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens … and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes.”
I heard that line on Thursday evening last week when I went to see the new movie, Appaloosa, a terrific duster starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as two gunslingers hired to keep the peace in the town that gives the movie its title.
But the words could just as easily have been spoken by Stephen Poloz, senior vice-president of financing at Export Development Canada, who earlier the same day gave the keynote luncheon address at the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit.
For a banker, Poloz had lots of funny lines as he delivered a logical explanation of how a bit of a live-for-today spending spree by American consumers in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks led inevitably to the near-collapse of the entire capitalist system.
If your world can be randomly eviscerated by unimaginable events well beyond your control, he argued, “what’s the point of having a credit card paid off?” This attitude led Americans to “spend every nickle they earned and every nickle they could borrow.”
The banks played along. “You can’t have a good speculative bubble without a good bank,” Poloz said, adding that the key thing the banks did was redefine what once was known as “uncreditworthy.” “Now we just call them sub-prime, and give them a loan.” Those loans were packaged up and sold off as well-rated and secure investments, adding further leverage to a situation that was already cranked way beyond sustainability.
And when housing prices stopped rising, the blow that American consumers feared would come from terrorists ended up being a self-inflicted wound. This last bit is my take, not Poloz’s.
What Poloz could not do, however, was give any counsel, and this is where he started sounding like novelist Robert B. Parker’s enigmatic retired soldier Everett Hitch. “The most important insight here is, we don’t know” what’s going to happen, Poloz said. “The models don’t explain what happened and they can’t explain what’s going to happen.”
Trouble is, he then started applying those broken models by way of reassuring his audience.
For example, he said the $700-billion package put together by the U.S. government would be enough to counter the $7 trillion he said speculators had blown into the markets because banks can take a dollar of fresh capital and lever $10 in new loans from it. Well, maybe under the old model they could.
Further, he said the meltdown of the U.S. economy would not have the same repercussions as those experienced by Latin American countries or Japan or others in decades past because, unlike then, the economy is not fragile, the regulatory regime is strong and the government has a good balance sheet. I’m not sure which American government he was referring to, but none of those three sound anything like they apply to the government that runs a big country just south of here.
For all of us who have been whipsawed by the markets over the past several weeks, the unforeseeable truly has been made into what our lives have become.
