Short Post: Gossip Girl’s missed marketing opportunity
Yes, I watch friggin’ Gossip Girl. Get over it and keep reading.
Despite a few innovators — mostly, I think, on the feature side of the entertainment industry — the gap between content creators and marketers persists.
I caught up on Monday’s Gossip Girl episode a little while ago and was struck by one exchange between Dan and Vanessa, where Dan’s advice to Vanessa about helping another character is to consult the evil Blair. “If you Google ‘revenge’ it comes up ‘BlairWaldorf.com,’” Dan observes.
Thinking about it later, I went to Google and typed in “revenge.”
No BlairWaldorf.com.
No Gossip Girl content of any kind in either the paid or so-called “natural” listings.
How expensive could the keyword “revenge” possibly be? Here are the current bidders on the keyword:
- Poopsenders-revenge
sweet revenge-the ultimate gag gift
mail cow, gorilla, or elephant poop
www.poopsenders.com - Impossible To Find Plans
Rare info on computers, spy, money
Revenge, electronics & 100’s more
www.theinformationcenter.com - Be Invisible - Stay Safe
Say It With An Anonymous Letter
Postmarked From Random Zip Codes
www.PostalSecrets.com - Get Revenge Now
Revenge Books & Ideas
High-Tech & Old-School Tactics
Absolute-Revenge.com
I somehow doubt that Poopsenders has a bigger marketing budget than The CW. (And we have a winner for today’s, “I didn’t think I’d see those words strung together” contest.)
Now, the folks behind Gossip Girl — certainly the execs at The CW — KNOW that the show is watched online as much as if not more than it is watched on conventional TV. When they tried to pull episodes offline last season there was immediate fan backlash. Even though The CW has trouble monetizing Gossip Girl as much as a conventional TV hit (e.g., Two and a Half Men, forsooth), that doesn’t excuse them from heavily marketing the show online. And this episode was shot WEEKS ago, and written weeks before that. “Duh… we didn’t know that dialogue was in there,” is not a credible excuse.
What this says to me is that there is nobody from marketing — probably nobody who even KNOWS anybody from marketing — in the writers’ room thinking, “how can we use this?”
This huge missed online marketing opportunity comes from a show that has as its central conceit the notion that tony high school brats in NY communicate largely through their mobile phones and an online social network.
Let me make this easy for you, CW folks: get an intern to spend half the day in the writers’ room and half the day with the marketing department.
Sheesh.
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