Sony forces us to watch 2012 with a roadblock
I gotta hand it to Sony, they sure are pulling out all the stops for 2012, which kind of makes me think the movie is gonna suck. The company will be advertising the upcoming film about the end of the world with an advertising technique that I’ve never heard of called “roadblocking.” But which road are they blocking? My precious, precious television!
The idea is simple: on October 1st, between the hours of 10:50 p.m. and 11 p.m., a two minute scene from the movie will air on 450 TV outlets at the same time! This will put the ad in front of about 110 million sets of eyeballs, and with 450 “TV outlets” (I’m assuming that means TV channels) being taken up, viewers will probably have nowhere to run! I wish Orson Welles was alive now so he could use this technique for a TV remake of his War of the Worlds radio program.
The funny thing is that Comcast is launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to advertise the roadblock on its cable networks. So, in essence, they’re paying millions to advertise the advertisement.
It’s definitely an interesting idea, but how many times can studios do this before people start getting sick of the roadblock hype? It hasn’t even happened and I’m already sick of it.
Source Variety
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