Movie Promotional Materials in Retrograde

I remember a time about a decade or so ago when the movie studios were first beginning to realize the power of the internet as a marketing tool. They would set up little sites about their upcoming movies on their own site with really long urls, and while it wasn't the most effective part of their marketing strategy, it did contribute a little more business to their bottom line.

But as both bandwidth concerns and technological processes made it easier to produce very graphically-oriented and more spectacular work, these individual sites began to be spun out into their domains and became far more powerful tools, and with each passing year, these web-based marketing initiatives were involving themselves into new areas, like Friendster's movie character "official" profiles that other users could say they were fans of, though these profiles were in addition to other more traditional web sites.

And then, I saw a commercial for John Tucker Must Die!, and I noticed that the official site for the movie was at Myspace in the form of a profile for the title character(and I was to learn that 4 of the female leads are also represented on the site). There is no other site to consult... it is purely a set of Myspace profiles.

Naturally, it is a 20th Century Fox film, but still... is this setting a bad precedent for other shows and movies in the future? Will I at some time have to visit Myspace to get information on 24 or The Simpsons? Now that is a horrifying prospect.

Tags: john tucker must die, myspace, 24, simpsons, profiles, friendster, social networks, marketing, fox, flash, cross-promotion, teens, ashanti