Fake Murder Posters - Clever or Crass Indie Movie Marketing?

Francis Xavier promoted his indie flick "Johnny Come Lately" by plastering the streets of Baltimore with fake reward posters seeking a murderer. Unfortunately, it looks like Mr. Xavier didn't take into account the negative backlash:

Misleading. Exploitative. A senseless and painful ruse. That's the reaction from those for whom the murder of a child is reality, not fiction.

"When I really learned its purpose, my knee-jerk reaction was something parents of murdered children say – murder is not entertainment," says Roberta Roper. "You have to walk in someone's shoes to appreciate that journey."

So how did Xavier respond? He claims "he didn't intend to mislead or offend":

"I was just hoping people would go to the Web site and notice it's a movie." While he has no second thoughts about his ad campaign, he realizes that the poster might make some parents wince. He has a 12-year-old daughter and twin 6-month-old sons. "That picture represents everything that is lost in the city every day."

He says the poster was an easy and inexpensive way to promote the film. "We're starving artists,” says Xavier, 42. "We didn't have any money for any big-time marketing. That poster was the only thing I could really think of to get people to notice the movie."

Personally, I think this trumps the lame, misleading "Godsend" effort at generating controversy from earlier this year.

Listen up Indie marketers: the old adage of "all press is good press" refers to celebrities, NOT indie films. I know it's exciting to see your film's title plastered all over the printed page, but bad press like this is completely USELESS in brokering the sale of your film. Why? Because clippings of this sort are completely unusable to a potential distributor. They only draw attention to the marketing and not to the substance of the film. They add no color, no insight, no pullquotes, and they draw attention to the director's inexperience and lack of judgement, thus making the content of the film open to that same line of critique.

The goodwill generated by the "18,000" website hits (always be leery of someone using "hits" to describe web traffic in 2004) is completely negated by the 80,000 or more negative print impressions he probably received. And worse, now this marketing ploy is THE hook for the film, so most upcoming reviews will be "tainted" with references to the stunt (not to mention the fact that some reviewers will now come in with a NEGATIVE bias).

Your marketing and publicity efforts should focus on garnering POSITIVE press for your clip book. If you're thinking about doing a provocative stunt, the consequences can be the unintentional "labeling" of your film by the media, and it might not be very flattering. Just remember that:

positive press = film festival interest.
positive press = distributor interest.
positive press = audience interest.

I'm interested to know what you all think. Am I being too harsh here? What would you guys have done?

Journal Gazette | 09/27/2004 | Phony film poster gets bad reviews