“A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.”
– David Ogilvy,
Confessions of an Advertising Man
In the last few months, I closely followed the marketing campaign for the horror film Longlegs, which stars Nicolas Cage as the titular serial killer, and Maika Monroe as the protagonist.
In our age where monotonous, and even annoying, advertisements are on every corner of the digital space, the campaign felt like a breath of fresh air. It reminded me of what marketing could be — fun, creative, and daring.
Especially in its trailers, Longlegs avoided the common pitfall of practically revealing its entire plot. Instead, it created an air of mystery and anticipation through cryptic ciphers, and out-of-context nightmarish imagery and sounds.
In one particularly interesting trailer simply titled Heartbeat, we get to hear Maika Monroe’s actual heartbeat, measured from the scene where she first saw Nicolas Cage as Longlegs. She reportedly had a resting heart rate of 76 bpm, which ramped up to 170 bpm during that scene.
I had no concrete idea what the film was about, but with every trailer, it slowly got under my skin. And how could I not want to watch the film, when its trailers boasted of a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating, and reviews praising it as “the best serial killer horror film since The Silence of the Lambs” and “the scariest film of the decade”?
But, alas, ambitious marketing can be a double-edged sword. With great expectations come great risks of disappointment.
As I left the cinema and started my car, the first thought that popped up in my mind was, “Is that all there is?”
For me, Longlegs is still a good film. (In fact, I watched it a second time the next day.) But it was definitely overhyped. Unlike what its marketing would otherwise have me believe, it’s not a masterpiece. It’s not comparable to The Silence of the Lambs. Neither is it the scariest film of the decade.
All in all, the film lacked coherence. It tried to do too many things at once. It did manage to hold together its various elements remarkably well during the first two acts, that it made me wish they could last forever. But it fell apart in the third and final act, which came across as rushed and unintentionally goofy at times. Ultimately, it ended on an unsatisfying note.
I think the marketing campaign for Longlegs did its job well, in the sense that it made me badly want to see the film. But perhaps, it did its job too well, in that the marketing was more interesting than the actual film itself.
As an antidote to this problem of overpromising and underdelivering, I’ve always believed that the best marketing that you can have is a great product — to let the product do most of the talking.
A common misconception that even marketers have about marketing is that marketing happens after a product is developed. With this understanding, marketing is only about promoting and advertising. Or that it’s the marketing department’s job to put on the make-up and dresses for the product, and make it seem much better than it actually is.
In reality, marketing happens at every stage of product development, from idea generation, all the way to product launch.
Marketing is baked into the very product itself, in that the product has to be “remark-able”, or worth remarking about. The product must have real value, in that it delivers timeless and tangible benefits to its users. The product has to be so well-designed and well-crafted, that it is its own main marketing machine.
A great product makes its customers happy. And in turn, happy customers do the marketing by talking about the product with other potential customers, like their friends and family.
Even a great marketing campaign couldn’t save a weak product, at least not in the long run.
Since we’re on the topic of films, The Blair Witch Project is another particularly good example of this. The film largely succeeded because of its marketing campaign in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when the Internet was just booming, and everyone believed everything they read online.
The film was marketed as a true story, made with “found footage” of college students who went missing in their search for the Blair Witch. A big part of the campaign’s success was the film’s viral website, which featured the students’ “journal entries” and “paraphernalia”, as well as interviews with their “family members”.
But like most people who watched the film without any knowledge of its marketing campaign, and decades after the found-footage horror trend fell out of fashion, The Blair Witch Project nearly bored me to tears. With its marketing out of the equation, there is really nothing spectacular about the film.
On the contrary, there are more than a few films that went on to become timeless classics, despite relying on modest marketing efforts.
The Shawshank Redemption, for example, bombed at the box office. But it is a great film, and the people who did go and see the film when it came out absolutely loved it. Through word-of-mouth, the film slowly become the cultural touchstone that it is today.
Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to downplay the importance of promoting and advertising a product. It is to reflect on the reality that the marketing shouldn’t distract the audience from the product itself.
Be mindful of how you portray your product in your marketing efforts, and be wary of the claims that you make. Because at every step of the way, you are setting up the audience’s expectations.
Going back to Longlegs, one of the reasons why the film let down my expectations is how its marketing overemphasized certain elements, like the Zodiac-killer-type ciphers, which didn’t turn out to be all that important in the film.
And of course, the bold pre-release reviews featured in its marketing led to very promising expectations. But, evidently, reviews can be misleading, even if they come from professional critics. Who knows what these critics were smoking?
At the end of the day, craftsmanship is the best marketing.
Izzat Zailan 