How To Translate The New Into The Old

In this article, we examine why it is so hard to translate the new forms of marketing into old media results. And what to do in order to be able to have the right kind of results.

One of the best recent viral marketing campaigns was for the movie Snakes On A Plane. Bloggers were actually able to influence studio execs, by keeping the name Snakes On A Plane, and suggesting a phrase that Samuel L Jackson said in dialogue, reminiscent of Pulp Fiction.

The studio execs were already thinking that the 1st weekend’s boxoffice would be over 100 million, a great investment since the movie took only 30 million to produce. They were surprised and dismayed to learn that the movie grossed only 15 million in its opening weekend. What went wrong?

One easy explanation is that the new media translates with difficulty into the old media. Bloggers and net denizens and the successful viral marketing campaign were not enough to get good numbers at the box office. Why? Because they neglected their traditional means of getting media attention, the old way through TV ads, movie critics, newspaper ads and etc. To get old media attention, you need old media methods. To get new media attention, you need new media methods.

If the goal was the upcoming release of movie only available online through the studio’s website, then it would have been successful. That is new media. Old media is sitting in a movie theatre. To get that kind of success, you need to reach the right people. Not the blogger in Taiwan. The movie fanatic in North America.

That is why it failed.

This is the old doing the new in a most successful way.

Peter is a 79 year old widower from the UK. He started doing videos for YouTube 2 weeks ago, under the alias geriatric1927. Since then, he has had over 2 millions view of his videos as well as over 22000 subscribers to his feed.

This succeeded in a most successful way.

Chartreuse on the old vs the new.