Living The Dream
So last night More4 broadcast a programme in their True Stories strand called Czech Dream. It was made as a final project by two Czech film school students, and followed their project to create an entire marketing campaign around the opening of a new hypermarket that didn't exist, all the way from the creation of the logo to the ribbon-cutting for the assembled would-be first shoppers in front of a hoarding which had nothing behind it.
Along the way, they enlisted the local office of ad agency network BBDO to create the campaign, and produced everything from faked up product packaging to TV and radio ads and flyers with product and price details on them. The end result was a bunch of people displaying really a wholly predictable set of responses, from anger and outrage to amusement and resignation.
As an experiment, I could see a few points of interest arising, but as a film I think it was terribly weak. To begin with, though various of the hoodwinked offered their theories as the the motivation behind the scam (including a test of people's gullibility or greed, comment about the nature of marketing, and interestingly, parallels with the then active Czech government campaign to encourage the population to vote 'yes' to joining the EU), at no point did the film-makers actually state what their aim was in the whole enterprise, rendering it impossible to make any objective assessment of the thing's success.
An attempt by the film makers to focus attention on the money made by ad agencies, media owners and the like when dealing with some angry people post the 'launch' felt like too little too late to save the structure, and actually had a nasty whiff of desperate post-rationalisation about it.
On top of which, having enlisted various people's involvement, they proceeded to treat them incredibly unreasonably. The woman who had done research on the effectiveness of hypermarket flyers for them was aggressively questioned about her role in helping big businesses put one over on the public, when her feedback had all quite clearly been in support of honesty and accuracy.
Overall, it felt like a big waste of time, energy and opportunity.