Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Prada Spends a Bunch of Money on a Wes Anderson Ad, and Then a Bunch More to Advertise It

A long, long time ago, if a famous director made a mini movie for an advertiser, designed specifically to be watched on the Internet, it was news. If you’re really old, you may remember waiting many minutes to stream John Woo’s BMW caper flick starring Clive Owen.*

Now this stuff is NBD. Or, at least, it’s no PewDiePie.

So if you’re Prada, and you hire Wes Anderson to make a seven-minute 45-second film for you, you can’t just put it on YouTube, where it went up yesterday and has not taken the world by storm (again: It’s no PewDiePie).

You’ve got to advertise your advertisement, which is what the company is doing with a seizure-inducing half-takeover of the New York Times’ homepage today. You can get a sense of that here, but if you want the full effect, you need to shade your eyes and head to the NYT.

nyt prada

And here’s the movie itself, which you’ll like if you like Wes Anderson:

And here’s what YouTube’s core demo is watching instead:

* Depending on your age, this may have been when you signed on for an AOL dial-up account, which you still have.

 

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”