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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

It feels like there is some ongoing sophisticated guerrilla marketing campaign to promote these movies. YouTube mysteriously promotes some video about how Oppenheimer was a great physicist, Columns are written about what the Barbie movie has to do with Feminism, and even on Hacker News there are multiple links per day about these two movies. Something is going on here.

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It's not even that sophisticated, it's incredibly obvious. Whenever a new movie is released, first you see the actors pop up for seemingly unrelated reasons like "so and so says their first date at such and such two decades ago was something something." That's to put them in the front of your mind, maybe get you to google them and see what they're up to - oh a new movie! The press tour begins. They start showing up on talk shows and mid-page CNN headlines. You're watching your usual YouTube videos and all of a sudden an interview with the actor and a talk show host is at the top of the recommended videos to watch next. You go to Reddit and see references to the theme of the movie on the frontpage. The movie trends on Twitter. Oh it must be at the forefront of public consciousness! The tipping point has been reached and now the marketing teams begin the full assault on your attention with pre-constructed memes ("barbenheimer") and narrative engineering about the movie ("<identifiable group> has <reaction> to <meme>"), the actors ("rumors swirl about <male co-star> and <female co-star>") and the box office performance ("do ticket sales for <movie> indicate a resurgence of <theme> cinema?"). This lasts for a few weeks, then it dies down, then the movie leaves theaters, and you don't hear about it again until it's released on Netflix and you get hit with a smaller-scale version of the same psychological warfare.

Recently it seems like some studio executives have realized they can get more bang for their buck by combining the marketing campaigns of two movies.

The movies seem refreshingly original and good, and the subjects are things people care about. All those things you said are also symptoms of legitimate interest. Attributing them to a conspiracy with no other evidence is kind of a reach.

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, but it is a movie based on a doll (almost like the ultimate commercial). It’s been done before (transformers) but it feels a little wierd this time.

normally I'm very suspicious of shilling and astroturfing, and you definitely do get it here on HN - especially wrt China and FAANG - but I don't think it's even remotely out of place that a highly anticipated feministic Barbie film is having columns written about it, or that ... there's a popular youtube video about the subject of the new Christopher Nolan film?

Barbenheimer is vaguely suspicious though, especially this article, describing what is pretty much standard procedure wikipedia fare as if it's a split between the Obamas

Barbenheimer was almost certainly a pre-constructed meme, or at least one that was given a boost by the marketing team once they identified it from some early candidates of organic memes. But its subsequent popularity is (at least partially) organic, even if it was originally astroturfed.

However, if Kotaku is writing about <dramatic event> regarding "the Internet's reaction" to <recent well-funded theatrical release>, it's not unreasonable to assume they were paid by a marketing agency to write the article.

Does anyone know of any tools or maybe analysis made by researches gauging guerrilla marketing vs. actual interest (which drives the algo)? Because both seem like very plausible possibilities to me. Or even a combination of both, which reinforce each other.

Maybe there's a guerrilla component to it, but it's been all over the NYT recently... Definitely a full press marketing campaign. And we're falling for it with multiple posts about the films hitting the front page recently.

I've wondered the same thing. It's really hard to distinguish real grass roots from astroturf.

It doesn't bother me. It's fine if the contrast between these films has just sparked off people's imaginations. But if there is some clever operation 'seeding' the memes and articles, I hope we get to hear about it some day.

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