Marketing, Part III: Run over by "Cars"
The promoters of the movie Cars have rented the entire automotive journalism establishment for a month. It's amazing. Every car magazine, tv show, web site, blog-where-people-are-paid, everything is simultaneously doing "stories" relating to that movie.
I realized things were headed this way in publishing some time in the 1980s when I walked by the big newsstand on Cahuenga in Hollywood and saw the same actress's face literally 15 in a row, 15 different magazines, all the same month, promoting the same star of the same movie.
In artillery, a "time on target" is a technique in which different batteries at different locations and distances from a target time each of their firings so that all of the shells arrive in the same place at the same time, multiplying their effect with terrifying simultaneity from all directions.
The marketers have us bracketed and they are firing for effect. Help!
I realized things were headed this way in publishing some time in the 1980s when I walked by the big newsstand on Cahuenga in Hollywood and saw the same actress's face literally 15 in a row, 15 different magazines, all the same month, promoting the same star of the same movie.
In artillery, a "time on target" is a technique in which different batteries at different locations and distances from a target time each of their firings so that all of the shells arrive in the same place at the same time, multiplying their effect with terrifying simultaneity from all directions.
The marketers have us bracketed and they are firing for effect. Help!