Harvey Weinstein: Marketing Genius

I don't want to get into the content of what the Dixie Chicks said or did, and I don't want to argue about whether this is a good film or not.  I certainly don't want to get into a First Amendment argument.

I do want to say, however, that what Harvey Weinstein did this week was brilliant.

He had a film that no one was talking about, called Shut Up & Sing.  When he started shopping it to networks to buy ads, the moment anyone showed some hesitancy, he went to the press to cry foul.

BOOM - 237 articles tracked in Google News, 347 blogs posting about it, who knows how much television coverage, especially on the Fox News and MSNBCs of the world. 

All free advertising for a movie that no one was talking about.

I just want to add one more thing, and I am not defending NBC here.  But when Alan Wurtzel, head of standards and practices at NBC was asked for comment, he said that "while the Weinstein Co. had shown NBC its ads, it had not inquired about buying commercial time. Generally, when an ad is rejected, prospective advertisers return and work with the network on ways to make it acceptable — as was done with the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11."

See? They had barely even started negotiating, and Weinstein went to the press - boom.  It almost doesn't even matter (from an advertising standpoint) whether NBC carries the ads now or not.  It may certainly matter in a larger sense, depending on how you feel about this particular issue, but from a marketing perspective?  End of story - genius move.

UPDATE: The New York Times wrote a piece on this, capturing the larger trend, highlighting the marketing challenges of Death of a President, Borat, Shortbus, Kids, Blood Diamond, and others.

"Hollywood appears to have hit upon a fail-safe strategy for getting attention for just about any kind of film: get someone, anyone, to try to suppress it, and then rush to the news media with breathless warnings about the First Amendment coming under attack."

Comments

[PoliticalCritic]

Weinstein is good, but NBC handed the free publicity to him on a silver platter. It was NBC who banned the ad because it was "disparaging to the President."

NBC is simply trying to save face now by saying that they were negotiating and Weinsteing had not bought an ad yet. NBC wouldn't let them buy the national ad.