It wasn’t an ad. It was a result of a google search you did. When you do a google search, it provides links to various sites. For movies they will provide links to review sites, like RogerEbert.com. That’s what they did.(I can’t believe I’m explaining this to an adult in 2019) Click on the link and you will be takes to Matt Seitz’s review, clearly under his name. Google has nothing to do with this movie and is not marketing it. You are yelling at the wrong cloud.
I can’t believe you are an adult.
I’m not the one who can’t figure out what a google search is.
Actually one good thing about this bizarre thread is that I learned about the movie, which looks cool and is available on Netflix. I might have to give it a shot.
Also, Matt Seitz was a friend and collaborator of Ebert who was hired as editor in chief of Rogerebert.com by Ebert’s widow, two months after the man had died.
“Roger Ebert” is now a brand name, like many other once living purveyors of goods and services whose names have now become brand names. How difficult is that to understand?
Colonel Sanders is still hawking fried chicken. And I still watch Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve. Death is not a disqualification in the world of marketing.
Yeah. I don’t like that capsule reviews on other sites say:* “‘I loved it’ – Roger Ebert”. I think they should say: “‘I loved it’ – rogerebert.com”*
It’s weak, chiseling shit that’s everywhere these days.
[Bolding mine]
I’m afraid it’s true. It’s tempting to call people immoral and unethical but really, I think most are just too lazy and don’t care about anything beyond themselves and their immediate families.
Thus, they end up immoral and unethical without even noticing it’s happened or that that’s a bad, bad thing.
The actual website is not the problem. The problem is other websites and aggregators who say that the review is from Roger Ebert, not rogerebert.com.
There was more than one that took that sloppy shortcut?
No. “rogerebert.com” is a brand name.
I think so. I can’t remember which though. I have seen it a lot. This thread rang a bell to me because I remember thinking the same things as the OP.
And in the first few years after Ebert dies it was easy to be tripped us by this. Even now there a likely many folks who know that his name = “good critic” but don’t know that he’s dead.
You say “sloppy shortcut” but would it be hard for you to believe that people do it on purpose to increase clicks?
[Moderating]
That’ll be a Warning for personal insults.
I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. They’re both brands. They’re both trademarks. This is how branding works. This is how it has worked for well over a century. There’s no “kids these days” issue here. This is how it’s been your whole life.
I also find it weird that so few see an issue with them using robertebert.com, a site that flat out says in its title that it is “Movie Reviews and Ratings by Film Critic Roger Ebert.” It was never presented as some sort of collaborative website or some group of people while he was alive, so why should it be when he’s not?
And that “in memoriam” banner is the type that most people will skip over when reading. They even use really light text and a light image so it will be very low contrast, making it more likely your eyes will skip over it. Add in how we’re trained to ignore banners by them being ads all the time, and I genuinely did not notice it was there and scrolled down the entire page.
It’s bizarre. I can’t say I can think of anyone else trying this, where a celebrity dies and other people take over his site and do the same things they did. If it was something like “ebertcoporation.com” I’d get it. Then you could argue it was like Disney, which billed itself as the Walt Disney company, and every already knew that Disney himself was not doing everything before he died. But it’s just using his personal site and his own personal brand.
I can’t help but feel that using his name is about borrowing some of his prestige and reputation. The brand applied to a particular person who is now dead–it did not apply to these other writers. They get a boost by being at rogerebert.com because of Roger Ebert’s reputation.
The website–as in its name–is part of the problem. It implies it is something it is not. I can’t help but think that the critics there show up so often because they borrow on his prestige, and wouldn’t if the writers were entirely under their own name.
As far as i remember, there were always other reviewers on rogerebert.com. Especially once he got more and more sick. To me it seemed like he was grooming them to carry on with his work.
I visit that site a lot, and it’s always obvious who wrote what review.
BTW Roger himself was the mastermind behind expanding his site to include other people, so it is disingenuous to imply anyone suddenly tried to pull a fast one after he was gone. Also, eg Seitz isn’t some random dude who assimilated the domain; he knew Ebert.
ETA knew Ebert, was in the same business, and helped him set up some of his web stuff in the first place.
I have trouble thinking of any examples of this on the web–where a person dies and the website that was just for their personal work is taken over by others who continue to do the same thing.
Heck, I have trouble thinking of parallels outside the Web. Disney is the closest, but that was always “The Walt Disney Company” and was such when Walt was still alive. They kept the separation between Disney, the (shortened name for the) company and Walt Disney, the man. Both were, in effect, separate brands.
That doesn’t seem to apply here. rogerebert.com was always billed as the online archive for Ebert’s own work, not as some sort of company he had created. When people talked about a review on rogerebert.com when Ebert was still alive, the assumption was that he wrote it.
And I think that is exactly what they are exploiting here. They have a cover-their-ass banner on top, but, as I said, it’s made as invisible as possible so that most people won’t see it. It seems they are deliberately exploiting the confusion.
If you have examples of this same sort of thing that I am not thinking of, I would love to hear of them.
This post reads as though you’ve never been to the site before today.
Also, im pretty sure Breitbart is still a thing even though he’s been dead for years.