Page A9 of today’s New
York Times is entirely blank. So is page A10, with the exception of a
cryptic website address at the bottom of the page: wordsarelife.com.
What could “words are life” mean? And where will the URL
lead us? To religion? Politics? To some
feel good pop psychology or philosophy?
In fact the URL redirects to thebooktheif.com, which is a rather conventional website promoting
a new movie, “The Book Thief,” based on the novel of the same name by
Australian Markus Zusak. Narrated by the character called Death, the novel is
about a German girl during World War II. The trailer and scenes come right out
of the style I call “middle brow art house”: soft, pastel or autumn colors that
seem painterly, music in the French light classical vein, a ponderous
importance in the voices of the actors as if every line dripped with meaning,
beautifully composed static shots. The director of the film, BTW, also directed
“Life of Pi.” Enough said there.
I checked in other newspapers—Wall Street Journal and two Pennsylvania dailies—and didn’t find
the ad. It may have only run in the Times.
The ad raises some interesting questions about marketing.
Clearly, the producers of the film think that people are going to wonder about
what wordsarelife.com is all about
and go to the website. I have no question that, compared to most other print
ads in any publication, this two-page ad will influence more of the audience to
comply with the call to action—to visit the website!
But once at the website, I wonder how long people will
remain before heading elsewhere, disappointed that what they are seeing is a
shill for a movie. Will people think, “Gee this approach is clever” or will
they feel let down and disappointed, having anticipated something political or
spiritual?
Two aspects of the website will tend to make people feel
disappointed or betrayed, as opposed to enjoying the cleverness of the pitch:
First off, you don’t go directly to wordsarelife.com,
but are rerouted to another website, which people who frequently surf the web
often associate with a betrayal or trick.
Secondly, the website is so derivative and unclever that it
is disappointing as a piece of entertainment. If, by going to the website, we
stumbled upon an incredible scene from the movie to the sound of offbeat or
catchy music, the creativity of the website would continue the creativity of
the print and that would be fine. But instead, we get a static image, some
pious words from a very serious young girl and music that sounds like leftovers
from a French flick about romance between octogenarians.
The film’s producers must have run the print ads in front of
focus groups, but there are many ways to skew the results of focus groups,
which is why they have no statistical validity. And it may be that the focus
group participants saw the ads without seeing the website, and so demonstrated
that the approach worked in terms of a call to action. We can only speculate as
to what research went into the decision to run the ads, but I get a gnawing
feeling that the producers and their ad folk misinterpreted the results of
research or fixed them through employing faulty methodology.
Yet even before we get to the website, I question the wisdom
of placing this ad. Is the front section of the New York Times the best place for this print ad? People read
different media in different ways and when they read a newspaper they read
different parts of the paper in different ways. The same people who actively
seek out movie ads in the entertainment section as part of planning their
evening or weekend they may skim past all ads in the front section, focused as
they are on digesting the overnight news.
The idea, of course, is that they can’t look past the two
blank pages and that they will be enticed to visit the website because wordsarelife.com is an open-ended phrase
that suggests spirituality, or at the very least higher order thinking—the very
kind of thinking the reader is supposedly doing at the time he or she is
reading the news section of the New York
Times. I can see this scenario
working in the real world, but I can also imagine large numbers of people
understanding immediately that the ad is a big sell and feeling betrayed even
before they get on their computers or portable devices.
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