The New York Times Magazine ran a piece today entitled A Turn of Phrase based in part on an interview I had forgotten that I gave. It goes on to discuss, in what I thought was actually a fairly interesting and insightful manner, the disconnect between Snakes on a Plane the film and Snakes on a Plane the phenomenon. As time goes on, people will likely forgot about this whole experience, but if anyone is going to learn a lesson about marketing and the link between the internet and the real world, this whole interlinked experience between product, promotion and ownership should be considered.
The people online owned the joke of snakes on a plane. New line owned the movie Snakes on a Plane. Both had the same origin, but both ran independently. Because someone was interested in one, didn’t mean that they would necessarily be interested in the other. And just because the internet is full of chatter, doesn’t mean that the real world is full of the same level of chatter. It’s a lot easier to be loud on the internet (see, for example, me) than it is in the real world.
There’s an excellent point about three quarters of the way through the Times’s piece:
New Line didn’t get a free ride from these creators; if anything, the creators got a boost from New Line: The movie promoted the hype more than the hype promoted the movie.
It’s true. And it certainly worked out to my benefit. However, after the movie opened and people were disappointed by the box office numbers, I had intense, but inexplicable, feelings of guilt. Clearly it’s not my fault the movie did less well than they had hoped it would do, and I had no real bearing on its financial outcome (nor had I ever tried to have any bearing on it), but yet I was somehow linked to this film. It’s success would have been my success. It’s failure turned out to be my failure.
In the interviews I give, I point out that there’s little about Snakes on a Plane that could be replicated by future entrepreneurs. Things become viral when they’re genuinely engaging. When they are something that’s so good that people feel the need to pass them on without being told to do so… just because. The problem in trying to create something like that is that you’re ALWAYS trying to create something good enough that people want to engage with it. That’s ALWAYS the goal. You can’t try to make something extra good so it will go viral, you should have been doing that the whole time. The problem with Snakes on a Plane was that what was viral was not the movie itself, but the idea of the movie. The concept was the joke… the movie was almost irrelevant once the title had been pitched.
Ok, enough blathering. Here’s the picture the Times included with the piece drawn by some guy named Leif Parsons:
Also, if you’re bored, there’s also some discussion of the New York Times story going on over at AltHouse.
