Yep! I got one too. Why not just send me a pass to see the film?

wait, wait. California makes wine? The California in the United States? a little far-fetched if you ask me.

Too funny. When I spoke at the Inertia conference, I proclaimed to everyone how important authenticity and transparency was because "you'll be amazed at the sensitivity of the bullshit detectors" in social media.

This is just poor...

The good news is that for future conferences we have a heck of a good bad example to showcase....

Any response when you email back?

Astroturfing at its worst!

Craig,

Funny stuff . . . Can't believe the ignorance of some 'marketers' out there. Thank goodness this type of stuff does not happen too often . . . or does it?!?!?!?

Cheers!

Dang, I didn't get this email. I must not promote my blog enough. Hint, hint.

I love the "I'm new to this world" part. Oh, really.

Good God! Thanks Craig for pointing this out. I'm an investor in this movie. I knew they had hired a marketing firm and that "blog outreach" was one of their programs. But this truly sucks! I'm going to try to head this disaster off at the pass, although I fear it's too late.

I wouldn't blame you for never wanting to look at this movie ever again, but it is sporting a high IMDB rating (8.5) and the audiences we've screened the movie to have all liked it. Anyways, thank YOU for being so honest to post that amazingly bad email from "Zack".

Phil - I'm sure the producers of this film were very serious, but whoever hired this PR firm really blew it. I'm afraid it's too late to head it off at the pass as this has already spread through the wine social networking system like wildfire. It only takes seconds to Twitter things like this to thousands. We'll probably go to the movie anyway, but somebody made a very bad choice.

Ooh, look! Instead of wine points, the Sad Investor is now offering us IMDB points. He's a one-trick pony. (I don't count the "I wouldn't blame you" shtick... that's older than me.)

With less sarcasm: Yes, apparently, they do think we're stupid in many ways. Not only do they think we've never heard of the event or the movie, they also think that 'everything on the internet is misspelled' so a bit of bad English will give a ring of authenticity to their hype. Oh, yes, and they also think that we aren't expecting their hype so they're free to make up lies and proffer false flattery.

If this is indicative of the expertise applied to other parts of the film, then I can safely give it a miss.

WOW! Thanks for the case study in what NOT to do when promoting a product to bloggers. As a wine PR professional myself, I would never have taken this approach.They obviously haven't done their homework.

Unfortunately for them, I think it will become a case study that we'll see in seminars for years to come on how not to promote to bloggers.

Jeff - by the way, what the heck are IMDB points?

The Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) allows its visitors to "vote" their affection/interest in movies, on a 1-10 scale. The case in point is http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0914797/ratings

Is it really true that dummies on the Internet don't know how to use the spacebar? I hadn't realized that this was a common typo.

I bet it was cut and pasted from Word and the formatting screwed up.

18 comments to this post. Mine makes 19. Marketing doesn't have to be good to be effective. I'd say Zack has played his part. Even if ineptly.

That said, the Camp is "always really insightfuland has great information about the Wine world." So he's not wrong about that bit.

Cheers!

Totally understand your treatment of this PR drone, but I went to see the movie this weekend on my own dime and found it quite enjoyable. It's a feel-good wine movie if you let yourself ignore the historic and scientific liberties. I hope people still give the movie a chance, because if you ignore because of some quaestionable blog posts, you are just depriving yourself. Seriously, I liked Mondovino too, but Bottle Shock is much easier to watch!