Promoting AVATAR to the masses

I’m hardly someone who can give you a complete rundown of all the marketing that has accompanied Avatar in recent weeks. I’ve been across most of it– I’ve seen the images, posters, trailers and featurettes just like any normal consumer might have. I haven’t actively sought out anything to do with Avatar, I’ve just taken in what has been placed in front of me.

I’m also someone who happened upon a ticket to Avatar Day, was bitterly disappointed, and have been hard to impress ever since.

It must take a die-hard James Cameron fan to not be at least a little suspect of the fantasy action film we are about to endure. That, or a severe love for fantasy films (in which case you might be looking forward to Avatar finally doing justice to the genre). In these cases, Avatar‘s a sure winner. What I’m pondering and most curious about is how Avatar can reach beyond the folks who are going to see it regardless. There are those who have followed it every step of the way for the past year or so, and then there are others – the majority – who are seeing the TV spots for the first time in their living rooms. They don’t visit film sites or religiously follow movie blogs. They only go to the cinema on occasion. It’s these people that Cameron and studio really want to go to see Avatar. They make up the extra bucks, the extra tickets and the eventual DVD buyers that push the box office over and beyond.

Kudos to them for attempting this on the back of Cameron’s vision alone, and not riding the guarantee of a franchise or already-solidified name like Spiderman, Harry Potter or Twilight (to name just a few, most recent successes).

To be frank, I’ve found everything about Avatar intolerable so far. I walked out of Avatar Day shaking my head in disappointment and questioning the claim by Jim himself that this film would be a game changer. I tried hard to remain open to the idea and not be negative for the sake of it. “Give it a chance, it’s only the beginning…”. I was comforted to learn that I wasn’t alone in thinking the stuff we saw at Avatar Day and that surprisingly disastrous first trailer were disappointing.

The first internet trailer we saw before anything else:

In all honesty: I want Avatar to kick ass. I want Avatar to blow me out of my seat and take me away to a world unseen and unimaginable. I’d love nothing more than Avatar to find the success it aspires to. Where I feel insulted is in the marketing of the film. Everything has been so pampered and cookie-cutter. There really hasn’t been anything extraordinary to blow audiences out of the water like the film promises. I guess that’s easier to gripe about than actually achieve (obviously) and I have no doubt the film will have its moments– I just wish more of it had come through in promoting the film in an original way.

I’ve been thinking: Does Avatar deserve the success it is likely to get? I’ve been caught up in negativity around Avatar because it has frankly done nothing to impress me, personally. If anything the marketing since the shambles that was Avatar Day have lessened my expectations and want to see this film. I can honestly say I’m not particularly looking for ward to it. I’m not excited about seeing it. I mean, why should I be?

I’ve said before that the posters that have been released all remind me of second-rate cheap science fiction paperback novel covers. The kind you find in the discount bins at second-hand book stores. They are clumsy, with large floating heads, crammed with as many elements from the film as possible (spacecraft, alien-beings, floating islands, moons…), and that font. I have no idea why Avatar doesn’t have a completely unique logo going on – but it doesn’t. That font is stock, unimaginative and plain.

Pick a genre, any genre. Avatar’s fetaurettes trailers and TV spots cater to all of them. From blatant family-friendly to dark and ominous action-packed – there’s a trailer set to capture just about every market available (those worth tapping, anyway). It’s a clever move, and one of the only times I can remember a film openly trying to present itself to so many markets and genres all at the same time. Consider these two vastly different TV spots embedded below:

Avatar action packed TV spot:

Avatar family friendly TV spot:

It’s interesting to see how similar snippets of footage can be cut in vastly different ways and used to strengthen the consumer confidence to put down some cash to see the film. Perhaps Avatar can do it because there really is something for everyone.

In Australia we’re seeing featurettes of a different nature on our television screens. Sam Worthington is an Aussie, you see, and the local networks are going mad over this fact. 20th Century Fox feed them ‘exclusives’ to show on TV for the first time coupled with interviews with the man himself. Unfortunately these locally produced featurettes have been hopelessly contrived, bland and painful to sit through. You don’t need to dig deep to learn that the Australian film industry is in the stinker at the moment — and part of the reason is the absolutely horrendously shitty job the industry does at promoting itself accordingly (as well as producing, for the most part, awful films) so it goes without saying that the international back-up of such promotion is equally horrendous. Hollywood films generally get by via the usual TV spots Down Under, and because we get so much American television programming to back up marketing pushes (interview on Letterman, Oprah, E.T., etc) upcoming films are generally covered accordingly. When handed exclusive clips, however, and access to interview ‘one of our own’, we tend to fuck it up just like we do our industry in general. Bland questions with constricted, un-inspired voice-overs introducing clips and trailers pay off only as cheap and dull.

However– that doesn’t mean any of this hasn’t worked.

The general movie-going public react when pampered accordingly. What’s safe and what works are proven practices, and that’s why we see the same kind of thing rehashed – the studio (in this case 20th Century Fox) has used this industry standard blend of featurette, trailer poster, etc on previous films to great success so there’s no reason it wouldn’t work on this. Especially a film which seems to have far-reaching brush strokes and demographics – trying a clever viral gimmick or expanding on the 3D aspect of Avatar might have been too risky, perhaps.

I guess I expected more game-changing marketing from a film said to be a game changer– which remains to be seen. Until Thursday, anyway.

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