'SHUT UP AND SING' Courts MySpace Audience
Nodding to the adage that no advertising is bad advertising, the Dixie Chicks are riding a torrent of criticism to promote their documentary "Shut Up and Sing." The campaign includes a Technorati-fed Myspace page created by Deep Focus claiming to be "the largest discussion of free speech the web has ever seen," which is funny because the comments are screened.
Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer explains that all political views are represented on the site but "jibberish" or threats of violence get filtered out. That's logical. It's not like anybody is interested in hearing fringey deviant opinions anyway. - Contributed by Angela Natividad
Comments
The movie's whole premise is, IMO, ridiculous, but they get kudos for innovative usage of the online channel.
Beyond MySpace, they've also tapped into the blogosphere with an open-author blog that allows comments from within ad units. They're also encouraging people to repost the ad units themselves -- very clever.
I've archived the ad units here, fyi:
http://adverlicio.us/topic/shut_up_sing
But when you get to the site, it's such a fucking mess that I'm immediately turned off. It's all about promoting the movie, not free speech, and the Dixie Chicks look more like marketing whores than First Amendment poster children. The "discussion" isn't even on this page, but on the "official fan blog" where its a lot fanboy/girl hoo-ha. More folks just talking to themselves.
Surprisingly, their site is actually pretty good for a MySpace page. I tried it out for two weeks and just couldn't get it ... 3/4 of the sites are unreadable, and just about everybody is looking for a booty call or to sell you porn.
Actually, the results of my little 2 week test were pretty funny - so much so that I posted the results Oct 29th on my silly, work appropriate, humor blog (Say No to Crack).