Nickel’s Worth of Free Advice: Don’t do this

Where to start on this.

It seems that John Campea, the gentleman who runs the excellent Movie Blog, has encountered the wrathful side of Paramount Pictures. John initially ran a couple pictures of Bumblebee from The Transformers feature film curently in production. After being contacted by the studio he took said pictures down, but only after confirming they really really wanted them gone. His point in asking for confirmation was that he was drumming up publicity and word-of-mouth for the movie. Despite that, he was asked to remove them.

There were a couple of pictures of cast members off-set still on the site, though, because he discovered this morning that his site had been taken down. That was the result of a Cease & Desist letter from Paramount to his hosting company. This took John a bit by surprise since he had never been contacted about those pictures and, being candid shots of off-camera action, it never occured to him that they would be a problem. So instead of sending John an email asking him to remove those pictures as well, Paramount went the legal route and contacted his ISP to have the site take down completely.

John has posted an open letter to Paramount that I urge you to read in its entirety. He states in it that he had been tremendously excited about The Transformers movie and was doing what he could – while still complying with Paramount’s wishes – to hype the movie to his visitors. That effort, John states, is over. The studio’s heavy-handed and inappropriate tactics have him swearing off any any further Transformers coverage. While – and John admits this – this might not amount to much for Paramount in and of itself, it is a previously valuable conduit of information and excitement about the movie that’s now been closed completely.

John is exactly right. Paramount could have taken one of two better routes with this:

1) Do the same thing they had previously done and send a letter to John directly.
2) Buck up and accept that this was word-of-mouth in action and that the leaked photos amounted to a huge amount of buzz.

I’m so outraged by Paramount’s actions that I’m joining John in his boycott of Transformers coverage. I will no longer cover any of the marketing efforts for the movie, I won’t link to other stories about it and certainly won’t be expressing my own excitement. John says he gets about 1 million visitors a month. I get about 4,000 to 5,000. Those people will no longer be exposed to any coverage – good, bad or indifferent – about a movie Paramount has a lot riding on. Should they decide to revisit and explain their decision to seek a legal means instead of open and honest communication I may change this stance. I’m making the choice to stand with John on this.

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movie marketing,paramount pictures