hype meets the brick wall

From Sundance (where, the NYT reports, there’s “Caution in the Air”) an icepick to the heart (if s/he has one) of any PR professional in Hollywood (and elsewhere):

[ Mr. Bernard of Sony Classics] also questioned whether the old methods of generating hype to drive a bidding war had perhaps outlived their usefulness.

In the well-received documentary “American Teen,” he noted, a photograph of a girl’s breasts is circulated to her classmates in a matter of hours. “It’s sort of like that here,” Mr. Bernard said. “I had to leave ‘What Just Happened?’ early to go meet a director, and where I was, these bloggers were getting text messages about how the movie was playing, while it was still playing. In a sense, the press is too immediate for the sellers, because they can’t really dupe people anymore.”

This sounds like an insular problem for Hollywood dealmakers, but that doesn’t mean we can’t all learn from this apparent limit to hype’s effectiveness—since we live in a world ruled by hype (what I have referred on this blog as PRopaganda^TM).

First, as I’ve noted repeatedly, most recently here, people have a strong desire to believe.

Also: bad buzz alone is never the single cause of failure.

Bad buzz is merely the planting of a negative opinion or of a seed of doubt. The seedbed it lands on must be receptive to the idea that’s planted, or to doubt. Furthermore, for that seed to spread, the soil around it must be fertile.

And then, of course, there must be some semblance of truth to the claim that’s being spread. (Buzz is only buzz, after all; it’s not the real thing—it’s someone’s opinion about the thing.)

Finally, bad buzz can be topped by new good buzz (as the father of PR noted).

The audience, which has a strong desire to believe (even if it is fragmented), will always be receptive to buzz, bad or good. All you need to do is find your target audience and then capture their attention. At the right moment.

Somehow, all this stuff is connected. One day I’ll figure out how to write about it.