I’m afraid I don’t follow. I was on about various mass-advertised movies that failed to break even for the companies that bankrolled them, and so lost, oh, say, sixty or seventy million dollars apiece without counting the advertising, and more if you do; you could of course argue that they would’ve lost yet more millions if they hadn’t spent the money on that advertising, which (a) admittedly does mean there are big important things to say about effectiveness; but, AFAICT, (b) doesn’t actually mean it’s profitable.
AFAICT, even today, they still wind up thinking they really and truly have something they can successfully market — such that they can sell the stuff and pocket a profit — only to once again wind up losing money on a project when the pitch really and truly doesn’t work out.
Isn’t the movie industry infamous for producing movies with enormous gross box office sales that somehow according to the accountants didn’t turn a profit? Or the airline industry, which theoretically has lost money since the invention of the airplane?
That’s a fun quip, but I don’t think it actually cuts against my point.
I always took it to mean that something like, say, BLACK ADAM pulls in roughly $400 million on a budget of roughly $200 million, and someone will get quoted as saying that it didn’t quite break even after you factor in all of the expenses that don’t technically count as part of the production budget — including, but not limited to, marketing expenses — such that an actor who contracted for Ten Percent Of The Profits wound up making NO money as a result of that clause, and that sure is a great story for the news: even if it more than doubled its ostensible budget, well, on the books, it didn’t make a profit!
And I’m sort of talking about the opposite of that; I’m talking about how a movie like THE LAST DUEL can fail to pull in $40 million on a budget of $100 million; even before we get to any creative accounting to deal with marketing expenses and other costs, it already didn’t make back half of what it cost; even with uncreative accounting, it could’ve tripled its gross and still fallen millions short of breaking even.
Your movie post came after the post I responded to.
I’d still argue two points. One, that mass advertising is a huge, global thing. Advertising on Google or Facebook or other places with billions of views doesn’t need to hit overall audiences. A tiny hit rate can be immensely profitable. Email scammers can make do with infinitesimal percentages because their costs are so low.
Two, the movie business is a poor example. Box-office grosses are terrible indicators of popularity. The multiple sources of income from streaming, DVDs, cable rights, merchandise, soundtracks, and more make huge differences that no one outside the accountants understand. Netflix never gives out profits and has just begun to announce audience size, and then only selectively. It’s also been known since forever that advertising cannot make a bad product sell and most movies are bad products. The good ones sell through word of mouth; the bad ones tank the same way.
Your movie post also uses both the terms advertising and marketing. They are vaguely related and do overlap in some ways, but remain distinct fields. The shortest coherent definition is that advertising is about a product and marketing is about a brand. Marketing is in the category of belief systems, the subject of this thread. Advertising is not.
Would you say — per the subject of this thread — the same sort of thing about marketing that you just said up there about advertising? That marketing has a problem much like the one faced by advertising when it comes to, as it were, selling a bad product?
I’m saying that one should not think of marketing in those terms at all. Does Catholicism have good marketing? The best. Is it a good product? People will disagree strongly.
In our current reality, membership is dropping rapidly in some places and growing rapidly in others. Is that success or failure? How much of each is based on word of mouth? How many people pay literal attention to the Pope’s pronouncements versus the headlines of priestly activities? How much advertising does the Church do?
Belief systems are not products. They may contain products but are not products themselves. They are as distinct as engineering and science, despite the way they are viewed as overlapping.
That is, I’ll grant, a tricky and interesting question. But would you still be asking the is-that-success-or-failure question if membership were simply dropping rapidly across the board? Or if it were growing rapidly across the board, with more and more people all over the place reverently paying more and more attention to the Pope’s pronouncements, or whatever?
I admit I might have this wrong, and would appreciate learning what’s what, but: I guess I always sort of figured that you could try to sell belief systems to people by using advertising and by using marketing — and I always sort of figured that you could likewise try to sell products by using advertising and by using marketing. I always sort of figured that, while advertising and marketing aren’t the same thing, you could call in experts on each when trying to sell people on, say, a political candidate, or a political party, or a political cause, or whatever, and both types of experts could help you work on, well, making that sale.
It is interesting, though,that the likes of Elon Musk are all worried about a genocidal “AI singularity,” a thing that has never happened before and may not be possible, but not a solar storm or asteroid strike, things that absolutely do happen and will inevitably happen again.
Logically, if longtermism is your outlook, immediate, massive investment in asteroid/comet defense has to start NOW. A ten-km-wide asteroid will end the species and for all we know it’ll hit us in twenty years if we don’t do something about it.
People have been arguing about the differences between advertising and marketing for a hundred years and I’m not going to be the one who settles the matter.
The best I can do is go back to your examples. This page gives the ten biggest Disney flops of 2022, many of them animated movies. Tens of millions of dollars of advertising failed to work.
But the Disney brand is doing fine. (Not to be confused, as I said earlier, with the Disney stock price.)
The Disney brand is the result of marketing, and today has little to do with any individual product. In fact, many people hate Disney passionately and not because they didn’t like what they saw at the theater last week.
The brand is larger than any product; it creates an instant mental image. Democrats are a brand, Republicans are a brand; individual politicians are not. You can sell a politician with some success. You cannot sell a Democrat to a staunch Republican or vice versa without the great difficulty of overcoming that mental association. Trump created a cult of personality around his brand. But he did so by solidifying the affirmation of those who were already Republican; he made few converts among Democrats. Will his brand last? Maybe not. Brands can be destroyed by major damage to the mental associations they conjure. All belief systems can. Will the great damage to the Catholic brand in recent years permanently bring it to its knees, to coin a phrase? I don’t know that either. But advertising billboards aren’t going to make that decision.
But did marketing also fail to work, in those cases? I know you’re quick to say that marketing didn’t fail to work when it came to the brand; but I’m asking whether marketing as well as advertising was used with those movies, and, if so, whether you figure marketing as well as advertising came up short.
And to the extent that you’re maybe leaning on some kind of marketing-a-brand-versus-advertising-a-single-product distinction in the context of Disney and Disney movies, I guess I’d ask about, say, a movie franchise. What should we say when a movie hits theaters with big expectations, such that the stars have already been signed to contracts that anticipate sequels, and — well, sometimes that happens, and we could arguably say a lot of stuff about how a brand or something like a brand is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to audiences coming back for more; but sometimes the effort just flops, and sequels get cancelled and those contracts prove unnecessary as the franchise fizzles out.
So: what should we say when a whole franchise fizzles out? Would it just be that the advertising failed, or could it be that marketing failed, too? And if we’re willing to say of a movie that, shucks, maybe the product wasn’t very good, and so advertising couldn’t save it, should we be willing to say that a movie franchise is a brand (or, at least, something more like a brand than a single movie would be) just wasn’t good enough to be saved by marketing?
I don’t have a clue about the amount of marketing Disney does for any individual movie, so I’m not going to attempt an answer.
I will continue to say that asking that is the wrong question. It’s as meaningless as asking if longtermism is a viable belief system based on the success of a single book.
I also think this hijack has been beaten into the ground, so I will politely withdraw.
Well, IMHO we need more there, but the point I made stands, and I’m aware of the evidence that tell us that attempts to make the dealing with Climate Change as being the same as billionaire longtermism to be really silly.
Longtermism seems to me like the evil bastard stepchild of the attitude that people should stop addressing supposedly minor concerns (in which they have strong interest and are well-suited to do something about) in favor of all pulling together to solve the Great Questions Of Our Time (poverty, inequality, universal affordable health care, climate change etc.).
If your thing is giving scammers or health quacks grief, rejuvenating a local wildlife habitat or focusing your attention and spare cash on abused animals, it’s stupid and counterproductive for others to sneer at your efforts because you haven’t devoted them to complex, extremely difficult problems that are Far More Important.
Well, in the “Long Term”, in only 5 billion years the sun is going to run low on fuel, expand into a Red Giant, and incinerate all of the inner planets including, of course, us. So, with our future destruction being an utter and unavoidable one, we may as well do whatever we want with utter disregard for the earth and its biological inhabitants.
So we’ve got 5 billion years to build enough generation ships to hold the entire human race (as of 5 billion years from now) and then send them out to other star systems which contain planets which are the right size, average temperature, atmosphere, etc. to allow one of the generation ships to land there and seed it with plants and animals from Earth so the humans on that ship can live there. Incidentally, it’s been calculated that the Earth will become too hot for the human race to live on in only 600 million years. Oh, no, we could build those generation ships and equip them in 5 billion years, but how could we possibly do it in 600 million years? We’re doomed!
Why tag it as exclusively a “secular belief”? A form of “Longtermism” is inherent in many religions. Christianity believes in an apocalypse and a final judgment and has a very fatalistic view of the human experience. There is an old German hymn that has the line, “I am but a stranger here; heaven is my home.” The Puritans, for example, pretty much had the view that one basically survives one’s existence on this earth by denying all pleasures of the flesh so that one could accomplish the truly important task of dying and going to heaven.
– and never mind that if we don’t deal with the problems that are imminent right now it may be a great deal less than 600 million years.
Or that if we’ve actually got 600 million years, any idea of what our descendents, if any, 600 million years from now will need to survive is only a wild guess.
