A couple days ago I was approached by Francisca Hu, a representative from the marketing division of Warner Bros. to see if I wanted to “help them promote” their new movie Constantine due out in a couple weeks. In case you’re not “with the program,” the character of Constantine is essentially an occult investigator. So I’m sure the thinking was that I would be a good point of distribution for people interested in this type of story.

Their letter was very friendly, though a strange mixture of canned form letter and personalization of the details. The idea they had was that I would help promote the movie on my website by doing things like “sharing my enthusiasm with my fans,” showing photos from the movie, and running contests (for which they would supply the prizes: movie posters, etc).

Anyway, I wrote back and informed them that I normally reserved my promotional work for people I knew, or struggling creators. If they were interested in paid advertising space, I’d be happy to accomodate them. Not surprisingly, they weren’t, but I had to give it a shot. They wrote back (in part):

It’s much more of a grassroots sort of marketing that goes along with big
advertisements and such. As mentioned before, we send out prizes, posters, and
other goodies for you and the winners on your site. However, if you wish to
reserve your promotional work for struggling artists, I totally understand!
it’s wonderful of you to help them out.

So they were very cordial all along, which is cool. I’m sure this kind of tactic works on a lot of websites. People get so excited that they’ve been contacted by a big company to “help out” on a “fun project” that they completely forget that when you advertise for somebody else, you ordinarily get money - quite often a good amount even.

In a way, it’s actually kind of absurd. Do movie studios approach tv stations or magazines, and ask them to “help out” just for the hell of it? Of course not. That’s fucking preposterous. The only reason they can get away with it on blogs is that the rules are less clearly defined, and there are probably people who will be your stooge because they truly enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong, I’d have run a contest and yammered about the movie a little if they threw me even just a couple hundred. Because I’m a monkey and we all know monkeys dance for peanuts - because we’ve been trained to by our reptilian corporate overlords. But I’m not gonna sit here and give MORE free advertising to one of the largest multi-national corporations in the fucking world. Especially not to a company that’s a staunch supporter of total bullshit ass-rape organizations like the RIAA, and the MPAA and that would just as soon sue their fans as send them “prizes, posters and other goodies.” Hey, I have a kooky marketing idea! How bout I run a contest to see who can get a subpoena the fastest? Pick me, pick me! Yay! WHOO! THE WB RULES!!! GO EVERWOOD!

Plus, these companies need to work on toning down their “corporation-speak.” I mean, the first paragraph of the letter they originally sent me was:

The eternal struggle between good and evil resides within one man: John
Constantine. The event film of the year, CONSTANTINE (rated R), starring Keanu
Reeves and action luminary Rachel Weisz opens February 18th.

And then they said “Dear Tim, Yadda yadda yadda.” I mean, first of all, am I a fucking robot? Do you ever start a letter to somebody by using words like “action luminary”? Do you ever approach somebody on the street by starting out talking about the “eternal struggle between good and evil”? If you’re homeless and schizophrenic maybe you do, but not real people. No way. That’s the problem with corporations is that they are essentially sociopathically broken off from the rest of us, from what real people do and are. Actually, no, the real problem is that we try to be like them, and we accept their inhuman behavior as role models for pretty much our entire culture.

Beyond all this, I think it’s retarded that they chose Keanu Reeves and “Americanized” the character of Constantine, and I told them as much. Why why why would you mess with a perfect character like John Constantine - a working class Englishman occult investigator? What could be cooler than that? I’m sure it was the choice of some fucking closed door committee of sociopaths who had all kinds of demographic charts and bullshit research and an endless parade of paradigms that proved that they had to completely gut a great character, and thereby an entire story. I mean, I’m still gonna see it, but I’m not going to “share my enthusiasm with my fans.” Oh wait, I think I just did. Fuck. They win either way, don’t they?