In the past few years I've been intrigued by the common complaint that companies are so bad at marketing these days.
Usually it's in the instance of something like:
"I hadn't even heard of X game but it looks awesome. The publisher is awful at marketing their new games!"
"Nobody watched Y show, even though it's really underrated. Netflix/HBO Max doesn't do anything to market their shows!"
And to be clear, I think there's a lot of truth to this. Maybe even more so for TV shows on streaming than anything else.
But my other immediate reaction is that there are also a lot of other factors than just the company's incompetence.
For example...
- Don't a lot of people use adblockers? or avoid watching anything with commercials? or fast-forward past commercials, or skip ads, or avoid looking at things that have advertisements?
- Magazines are mostly dead, which I feel like were the DOMINANT way to hear about media, either via the coverage or the print ads. People were exposed to so many new things through TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Nintendo Power, EGM, etc
- The "discoverability" on digital storefronts and streamers like Netflix, Nintendo eShop, etc is pretty bad and makes it tough to hear about things you'd like. This is honestly where I point the finger of incompetence.
- The best way to hear about things you'd like would be to follow smaller publications or curators/tastemakers that you trust. But sadly, big corpos and big social media companies have really financially choked those types of publications out. How likely is it that you're reading Netflix's official tweets or Square Enix's official tweets regularly? How likely is it that you're keeping up with episodes of Jimmy Fallon or other such schlock to see where the marketing departments sent their actors out to?
- The likelihood that you'll stumble on something new and cool in the aisles of a physical store are, y'know, plummeting rapidly at this point.
I'm not saying this to defend the companies or their marketing or anything, I just think that their marketing department's hope in this day and age is that "posting on official social media and paying for some digital ads" will suffice, but people are rapidly not even looking at those things anymore. I think people hope that these cool shows and games will come across their timelines on their own, which is hard to rely on. You pretty much have to seek it out intentionally.