THEY'LL BE COMIN' ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN THEY COME

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how entertainment companies couldn't buy a clue. There was the debacle with Paramount over a blogger using promotional pics from Transformers (thereby *gasp* promoting the film and helping Paramount, much to Paramount's dismay), and then there was Atlantic Records' refusal to permit "Weird Al" Yankovic to do a parody, which on a scale of 1 to 10 in stupidity ranks at about eleventy billion. Both of these ended up garnering huge publicity, but not the kind those companies would have wanted. I'm sure the executives themselves believed these to be genius moves, but to the rest of humanity it just sort of resembled chimps playing chess.

But as with all learning curves, there are some students of the game that are a little ahead of the pack.

Chris over at Movie Marketing Madness told us recently that one of the sleeping giants had finally woken up to the sound of bloggers. Universal Pictures, in one of their brighter moves to date, actually got in contact with him to discuss the marketing strategy surrounding the release of Miami Vice.

First, congratulations to Chris are in order. Dude writes a killer blog about movie marketing, probably the best I've ever seen hands down. I have no idea how he writes so much, while still managing to sleep, eat, and hold down a 9 to 5. I struggle with one blog post per day, but with him, I literally have to pick and choose what I want to read from him, because he writes so much I can't always keep up with it all!

Second, it's about time one of these companies opened up and embraced a blogger! For a while there I was thinking that the indies were going to be the only ones, but this is a huge step for Universal. Finally a bigger entity is starting to see more opportunities for promotion outside of the mainstream media. This is a big thing for bloggers and independent journalists.

What does Universal stand to gain from Chris? Only everything. Free press. Free publicity. Free mentions from Chris's friends like myself, Mack, and Tricia, as well as a growing list of others. Interaction with consumers. Good will built up with the online community. FREE, FREE, FREE! You just can't buy this type of advertising. What do they stand to lose? Absolutely nothing.

Hats off to Chris, and I can't wait to see what you post about Miami Vice. Hopefully this will get the ball rolling for the rest of us. (And you record companies and management agencies out there WAKE UP and hit me up with stuff about your artists.)