It took The New York Times basically forever to write about a phenomenon that we in the post-advertising age have known about for years: Hollywood's recent failures as a storytelling machine. To quote from today's article lamenting the death of the art of narrative in American movies, "How do you compete with Transformers?"
No doubt there is still good cinema being made in America. I can think of two Hollywood blockbusters from last year alone that were also great films (There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men). But the trend in Hollywood today is strongly toward shitty movies. The article blames the audience, "consumers get what they want." For some unknown reason (although cell phones and Twitter are cited), audiences don't seem to care about stories anymore, instead going in for big special effects.
My poop can make better arguments than this one. Hollywood operates like a car engine. If you put really good fuel in the engine, make sure it's well-oiled and drive it appropriately, you'll get to where you want to go. The movies themselves are the motor oil. Now, if you do all of the right things but put inferior motor oil in, you're still going to get somewhere. The fuel, the driving, maintenance...that's marketing, distribution, star power, special effects...the Hollywood machine.
Take Transformers. It's an inferior product, but it received top marketing, star power and special effects. So the Hollywood machine drives off to the bank. Imagine if it would have had all those things and a good story. It's possible. We've seen it in the 1970s with Star Wars or much more recently with The Matrix and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. And, besides, there are tons of Hollywood movies that could have easily been filmed 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, before CGI.
The story is the thing, Hollywood. You pander to brands that want their product to dominate a film, to computer geeks and geeky directors who are all about explosions and alien blood and HD resolution, and all with the supposed mission of making a better product. You come out with steaming piles of shit followed by even steamingier piles of shit. And then you have the gaul to blame the audience?! This is what they want, you say. Look at the films mentioned above that used modern production techniques well and, more importantly, told a great story: They were HUGE hits.
But we're not here to save Hollywood. We're here to save advertising. And this represents a big opportunity for brands that understand the problem and the solution. The entertainment industry is more fractured than it ever has been. Beyond that, the traditional power players (Hollywood, for example) are failing and don't know what to do about it. They can't even figure out why they're failing. There is an audience out there hungry for good stories. People always have been hungry for good stories and they likely always will be. Brands have lots of great stories to tell. There are those of you who might say that it's crass for a story to be told in order to sell something. I would argue that there are few stories that are told that don't attempt to sell something (see: The Bible, for one; and I mean "sell" in the broadest possible way).
Step into the breech, brand advertisers. You have stories to tell and people are hungry for stories. So, are you going to spend your next $50 million on a bloated 60-second spot shoot and a ridiculously expensive media buy that basically screams "I'm out of touch! I only want to trick you into buying things! Like me!" or are you going to man up, figure out what your brand story is and tell it? After all, in the post-advertising age, the brands that tell the best stories win. Here's one great example from just this week.