Why are movie-character blogs so bad?

Using Elizabethtown, the new Cameron Crowe movie with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, as an example, Movie Marketing Madness weighs in on the concept of character blogs. The Elizabethtown site has a section called “Claire’s America,” which is supposed to be a blog written by the Dunst character, a flight attendant, about her travels around the country. Not surprisingly, says MMM, it isn’t very good: “Almost no character blog I’ve come across has come anywhere near sounding like a real person or like it wasn’t written after hours of drafting and revisions by a team of marketers. They’re often stiff, formal and not very fun to read. Claire’s Journal on the ETown site certainly falls victim to this as it’s almost unreadable for more than a couple minutes. ... Marketers would be wise to spend less time on crafting these character blogs and redirect that energy into getting real people from the movie’s production on the computer to post updates. That, I think, is what people would be more interested in on a website.”

—Posted by Tim Nudd

October 18, 2005 | Permalink