"AND THE 'HEAD IN THE SAND' OSCAR GOES TO..."

AND THE 'HEAD IN THE SAND' OSCAR GOES TO...

Awards marketing for Birdman with Michael Keaton...

exposes some antiquated Hollywood strategies...

that the fashion industry recognized and changed 20 years ago...

and Cary Grant pioneered in the 1950's.

In the early 1990's while directing marketing at Donna Karan Menswear, I began receiving requests from 'online media' for access to seasonal runway shows.  Initially skeptical because there was no body of work to judge their merit, we were among the first to recognize this growing contingency of influencers and validate their contribution with show invitations.  Today, popular bloggers and you- tubers dwarf their traditional media counterparts in audience, in influence and at that time, in immediacy of information dissemination.

As an industry that relies on setting trends, the fashion business is usually among the first to entertain new visual creative marketing concepts.  With marketing for film and fashion now strongly linked, I was intrigued to learn that a movie marketing practice that became obsolete years ago is still being employed.

One of the films with great Oscar buzz is Birdman, the art-imitates-life comedy starring Michael Keaton.   Sohpisticated lobbying campaigns have been underway for months by producers to get Birdman and other films selected as winners in the upcoming awards season.   And the stakes are high.  It is estimated that a Best Picture win at the Academy Awards translates into an additional $14 million jump in box office receipts, according to IBIS World.  The film began as a limited release in NY and LA on October 17.  Movies with themes thought to be challenging by their studios often start as limited releases prior to broader release at a later date.   Birdman was selected for limited release because it straddles two genres -- part comedy and part biopic -- that may create audience confusion.  It became available to the rest of the country on October 31.

This 'delayed discovery' strategy by studios harkens back to a day when audience feedback could be limited geographically and 'controlled' by Hollywood.  It's completely useless today because bootleg copies of DVDs sent to Academy members and social media make a mockery of any attempt by power-brokers to limit exposure.   The 'limited release' is counter-productive because in the two weeks from Birdman's initial release until its general release, the film became 'old news' to many potential movie-goers who must have felt they'd already seen it given the amount of information made available in the interim.

It's a relic of the old 'studio system' when Hollywood held their stars under ironclad contracts that broke down in part when the stars themselves, specifically Cary Grant, discovered that they, not their studios, were what the public craved.

Limited release?  Unlimited anachronism.  As discussed in Jeff Simon's review in the Buffalo News, it's time for this marketing relic's extinction.