Monday, April 09, 2007

Bait and Switch

Ages ago, I subscribed to a video podcast promoting Nacho Libre, the Jack Black film. Hey, I'd just got a video ipod, vodcasts were all new and shiny, and I have a kind of a thing about wrestlers (ssh!) - what's not to like?

Anyway, sorting through my iTunes library, I notice that the old podcast folder has changed name, and suddenly, I have a huge number of videos on my harddrive promoting Blades of Glory.

I can but presume that the feed has been... recycled somehow.

I'm not really liking the ethics of this move, if I'm honest. There's a qualitative difference between the two films if nothing else (Will Ferrel is not, no matter how hard he tries, Jack Black; Will Ferrel is not a lot of things, in my books). I assume some marketeer has thought this up as a way of introducing the film to a sympathetic audience - hey, they're both dumb comedies with men in spandex, right?

Wrong. Sorry, you've alienated me even further than the cheap homophobic jokes in the trailer already did.

Show some manners, marketeers. My eyeballs pay your wages; and in this case, so does my bandwith.

4 comments:

Matt said...

I'd bet cock-up over conspiracy on this one - i.e. some poor intern in the 'new media' dept. of whichever hollywood studio, using the same URIs to place the will ferrell movie within the itunesosphere.

Anonymous said...

Ooo... I subscribed to the same vodcast at the time...

*goes off to check itunes*

kim said...

Yes, probably. But... RSS feeds are kind of complicated, surely? Takes work to do something like that. Or extreme idiocy.

Actually, occams' razor suggests dumb before intention, doesn't it? I do forget that some times.

Anonymous said...

Definitely cockup.

By the time this was communicated to the new media guys, or it was confirmed the rights definitely were sorted and it could go ahead, there wouldn't have been enough time, resource or budget to set up another feed on the enterprise web servers using their cranky no-longer-supported content management system. Meanwhile the sponsor would have been promised something or other, and the press releases would already have gone out - the NM guys would have taken the least worst option.

They would have just recycled the same bit of code and process.