gods of media

Heard about the God of War Promotion yet? If you belong to PETA, you might want to skip this one.

More than half of me is thinking, "that marketing strategy is brilliant. Risky, inspired, and creative." A mere 40% or so is thinking, "what a crappy reason for an animal to die." Does this mean I've gone to the dark side?

Lately I've been fascinated by marketing, advertising, and PR. In fact, I've been slowly chewing my way through the library's selection of books on the subject, having wandered into them after tackling the subject of business writing.

So far, my thoughts go something like this:

Advertising is not the creature it used to be. While not entirely obsolete, its power is diluted to such a degree that it's more of a reminder of the product than anything else. If what you're advertising isn't already famous, no one cares. They'll remember your punch-line, not your product. Example: Remember OutPost.com? Yeah, no one else does either.

*PR is the new advertising. Rather than going directly after the consumer, PR aims at getting a product covered in third party media, which are automatically more legitimate to jaded consumers than ads. Example: Sony sacrificing a goat to get the attention of the gods of media.

The mystery is how to go about getting PR. By committing an act of barbarism and indulging in such a hedonistic display of irreverence, Sony did something that I can't help but view as artistic: it's meant to piss people off. It could backfire, but man, you have to admire the guts (ha!) that the promoter behind that project must have.

I mean, how do you pitch that? "I'd like to sell this product by parading half-naked women around and slaughtering a goat. Then we'll get testosterone hyped fan-boys to eat warm offal. By combining indecency, the degradation of women, and cruelty to animals, we will create the perfect trinity; women's groups, conservatives, and PETA will do all the PR for us!"

Which is why I think it's brilliant. Further evidence of this brilliance is that now I'd really like to try God of War. None of the advertisements elicited so much as a twinge of curiosity, but a goat died for it, and I want to know what the big deal is.

When really, the only "big deal" is probably that Sony's PS3 got roundly spanked by the explosive sales of Nintendo's Wii, and they're willing to do anything to yank the spotlight back. A few months ago, buying a Wii meant that you were the coolest kid on the block and everyone wanted to try it. I know one guy who bought a PS3. We made fun of him. And that is the opposite of good PR.

pearls before breakfast

I tripped over this interesting bit of news and was absolutely fascinated. What happens when one of the world's finest musicians takes his $3.5 million Stradivari violin and plays in a subway station for the better part of an hour? He got $32.17. Over a thousand people walked past him, a handful stopped, and one person realized who he was. You can read the entire thing here.

"A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work."

live inside the book

I like Tanith Lee. She knows that things can be beautiful because of their mystery, and does not patronize her readers with all the answers. She skates along the edge of mystery and darkness; sometimes her work falls over the line and I can't quite follow. But when she hits that balance of mystery and beauty and humanity (Silver Metal Lover, When the Lights Go Out, The Claidi Collection) she gets it.

I think this quote is beautiful. It makes me want to spend more time writing--and not just the grinding-away-for-money kind of writing.

"When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, fee its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one.

Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all those other places than here."

-Tanith Lee