The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is a documentary that revolves around the advertising realm that invisibly pupeteers the world, placing ads on a building, making your favorite hero drive a specific car, so on, it went into some philosophical questions and showed its dangers as well as its strengths, but overall seemed to be about informing the viewer on its impact. The message of the movie by the end of it seemed to be something like, be aware of ads, or “do you want this?”
One area that the movie covered was a Brand’s personality. A brand’s personality is the way that it attempts to come off to the consumer, Nike’s might be ambitious for its emphasis on never giving up and following one’s passion for instance. My brand identity might be seen as Creative yet organized, since I enjoy coming up with different ways to present and do things, but within certain parameters. Brands that have the same personality might be Starbucks, Microsoft, Facebook, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins. and so on.
They used a lot of terminology that doesn’t normally come up either, for example Brand Collateral, which is how a brand is promoted, Co-Promotion, where two brands work together to advertise each other, Sell-Out, which isn’t really an industry term but seems to mean damaging one’s own Brand Identity by becoming more commercial for the sake of popularity, as opposed to Buying-In, which does the same thing without damaging one’s Brand Identity.
Shameless Self-Promotion is when you advertise yourself in a way that seems to betray your brand, it relates to selling-out in that way. Shameless Self-Promotion as opposed to selling-out though, can be done in a way that doesn’t actually hurt the brand, for the movie for instance, it actually worked out, since that was the entire point.
One of the things I learned from this movie was the importance of knowing who you want to market yourself to, and what you want to convey to others, it’s the kind of thing that was very important to the brands in the film. Another thing I learned was how important persistence and safety was, in the begining when he was still seen as dangerous or a wild card he got no calls back, but, through persistence he made some break-throughs and as brands saw him as a safe bet, things blew up. The most useful to me though, was the prevalence of ads that I got to learn through his movie, when researchers began to appear talking about how they influence us to buy things.
