A note to the Film Distributors and Theatre owners out there

I know there is one issue that most people agree on: they are sick of seeing straight-up advertising before movies. I am not talking about the previews here; I am addressing the placement of television ads for products and services before feature films at the theatre and on DVD/VHS recordings.

If the theatres, studios and advertisers insist on showing the movie-going and renting/buying public ads before features, they should at least compromise with us all and not show the same ads they do on television, because we all know they can do better.

I mean, look at the BMW Films series of branded content. You are telling me that the audience wouldn't respond to seeing well-crafted narrative short films featuring A and B-list celebrities and directed by accomplished directors? I am paying for that experience for an engaging narrative, and the BMW films ads do have that quality to them. Ads of this nature would be a welcome change from most of the drek we are subjected to before a movie. Considering the quality of those short films, they are probably better than most of features they would be the vignettes to.

Or how about some more of that old-time spectacle like that Honda ad... something that could be water cooler/web forum talk, ads which would be perpetually on Youtube and take on a life of their own, and while these ads may be expensive, they could probably yield better results than the ads that are currently being used and it would probably do a lot to clean up that black eye the industry is getting for how ubiquitous advertising is.

So I implore people at all levels of this problem to demand better. What's the worse that could happen?

Tags: advertising, movies, bmw films, honda, clive owen, the hire, the driver, david fincher, futurama, youtube, previews, ads, television