{"id":1125,"date":"2023-03-04T13:38:39","date_gmt":"2023-03-04T13:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/?p=1125"},"modified":"2023-03-04T13:38:39","modified_gmt":"2023-03-04T13:38:39","slug":"warner-bros-spams-bloggers-then-lashes-out-against-reactions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/warner-bros-spams-bloggers-then-lashes-out-against-reactions\/","title":{"rendered":"Warner Bros. Spams Bloggers, Then Lashes Out Against Reactions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I received a pretty bad pitch from Warner Bros. In fact, it was so clueless I forwarded it to A-list technology blog\u00a0Techdirt.\u00a0 Mike Masnick been doing a great job of covering the entertainment industry\u2019s (rather entertaining) ongoing misunderstanding of this whole social web thing, so I\u2019m pleased to see him\u00a0share the story\u00a0with his community to continue that dialog (and\u00a0<em>maybe<\/em>, just maybe help them \u2013 although they haven\u2019t been listening so far).<\/p>\n<p>The pitch was as follows:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Hello,<\/p>\n<p>I am a part of the Warner Brothers word of mouth marketing team and recently came across your blog! Your blog uniquely stood out as dynamic, informative and highly creative. We are seeking bloggers that are passionate about entertainment to help us engage your readers with content that would be interesting to them.<\/p>\n<p>We would like to have you join our WB Word marketing team to let fans know about our latest releases and relevant content\/products. As a member of the team, you will be asked to display photos, clips, and stories on your Blog, Facebook and Twitter accounts. The best part is you will get paid! Additionally, we may even debut event previews and new content so that fans like you get to enjoy it first.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As Mike noted in his reaction:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Here\u2019s a tip for Warner Bros.\u2019 \u201cword of mouth marketing team.\u201d If it\u2019s really \u201cword of mouth marketing,\u201d it probably doesn\u2019t require you to pay people to talk about you\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But this pitch is worse than not being actual word of mouth marketing.\u00a0 To me, the pitch shows a deeper problem with the media brands of yesterday.<\/p>\n<p><strong>In essence:\u00a0 Warner Bros. could care less about anyone they pitched.\u00a0 To them, we\u2019re just numbers.<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The reasons we know this?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They say \u201cmy blog uniquely stood out as dynamic, informative and highly creative\u201d yet they didn\u2019t even personalize the email.\u00a0 Obviously they said this to everyone.<\/li>\n<li>On the landing page they linked me to in the email, (I took that part out, they do not deserve link love) they mention it\u2019s to receive information for a TV show.\u00a0 Except, blog readers here know\u00a0I don\u2019t even watch TV.\u00a0 So why would I possibly care about this?<\/li>\n<li>I am vocally opposed to\u00a0paid blogging.\u00a0 Of course any time someone tries to pitch me on paid blogging I\u2019m going to react negatively.<\/li>\n<li>I\u00a0blogged about EMI\u00a0for doing something very similar in a not-so-positive light.\u00a0 Clearly I\u2019m going to share these pitches with the web.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They are taking the spray and pray, direct marketing approach to social media.\u00a0 Except, the social web is not merely a numbers game.<\/p>\n<p>The story actually gets even more interesting and\u00a0<em>really<\/em>\u00a0gives insight into the mindset of some of the marketers working for traditional media brands.\u00a0 Someone from the Warner Bros. team left the following\u00a0comment\u00a0on the post at Techdirt:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The WB Word Team is fully accredited by WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association), which is in regular contact with the FTC regarding disclosure laws. As far as the incident you cite in you story, we were in the process of identifying key influencers on the web who we felt would be relevant to promoting our projects (television and not film as you represent in your story). This was clearly an invitation to join our team and was completely transparent in its intent. All of the work done by the WB Word Team is also fully disclosed and transparent and team members chose which projects they want to promote based on their individual likes and opinions of each specific project.\u00a0 We are dismayed that you wouldn\u2019t call first and check your facts before writing this inaccurate story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And, a Techdirt commenter\u00a0responded\u00a0with a keen observation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Is this seriously the reaction they would have to this article? All a response like this would do is confirm everything that was said about how they really don\u2019t get it. It\u2019s mind boggling in it\u2019s misunderstanding of the message presented.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve gotta give WB the benefit of the doubt here and assume someone else went to a lot of effort to sound credibly like them. That, or the people in charge of the WB Word Team are astoundingly misguided in how to engage and interact on the \u201csocial web\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Step 1) Try to bribe people<br \/>\nStep 2) Lash out at people who suggest bribery isn\u2019t as effective as engaging your audience<\/p>\n<p>What\u2019s step 3? Sue and lash out at your customers that are trying to talk about your films\/television and issue DMCA take-downs against them because they used a clip you provided \u2026 \u2026 oh \u2026 yeah, I guess they do that too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Indeed.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s time for the entertainment industry to stop\u00a0fighting the future\u00a0at every turn and work on\u00a0understanding their audience\u00a0and\u00a0developing relationships\u00a0instead of treating us like numbers.<\/p>\n<p>When much smaller private companies truly understand\u00a0how to pitch a blogger, it\u2019s amazing how public companies with\u00a0billions in revenue\u00a0get it so wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I received a pretty bad pitch from Warner Bros. In fact, it was so clueless I forwarded &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"Warner Bros. Spams Bloggers, Then Lashes Out Against Reactions\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/warner-bros-spams-bloggers-then-lashes-out-against-reactions\/#more-1125\" aria-label=\"More on Warner Bros. Spams Bloggers, Then Lashes Out Against Reactions\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1125"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1210,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions\/1210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bursucretleri.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}