Column: Where have all the Hollywood movie ads gone?

A few weeks ago, an item crossed my Twitter about the new rom-com “Ticket to Paradise,” starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, passing the $100 million mark in global box office. The reason I saw this on my timeline? Because someone had quote-tweeted it to note: “I literally have heard nothing about this film. All I know is they flirted in a video I didn’t even realize was promo for this movie. What is going on with marketing Hollywood right now?”

A few people chimed in with varying experiences, from “The marketing has been ABYSMAL!” to “There’s a big billboard for it near the place I live” to “Why haven’t I heard more about it?” to “I feel like I’ve been seeing posters everywhere on the subway.”

What is going on, indeed.

I saw a similar exchange a few days later about the Netflix stop-motion film “Wendell & Wild.” “This is really weird,” someone said, “because everyone has either seen tons of promo for it or none at all. I literally just found out about it through Twitter.”

That’s targeted advertising for you, someone else surmised.

I think it’s actually something else. Or a confluence of a few something elses.

For most of TV and film history, we absorbed information about upcoming releases through a combination of TV, print and radio ads and coming attractions in the theaters themselves. Even if you weren’t paying much attention, you were passively absorbing it through pop culture osmosis. It was just in the air all around you and there was a sense that you could go about your life and expect this information to be served up to you with minimal to no effort on your part.

I think many of us are still in that mindset.

But that monoculture doesn’t exist anymore.

Social media has splintered people off in different directions, and if your self-curated feed isn’t serving up every title you might be interested in (you can thank an imperfect algorithm for that) and you’re not seeing movies in theaters these days, or watching old school network TV anymore, or riding public transportation — places where you still might reliably find ads and trailers — it maybe does feel like certain projects aren’t getting any promotion.

At the same time, someone else, someone even in your own household, might be getting bombarded with it.

“There’s no question that we’re seeing incredible fragmentation when it comes to marketing,” said Tim Calkins, the associate chair of the marketing department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

“More and more, the era of reaching everybody is fading away. You see that in lots of different industries, but you particularly see that in entertainment. In the old model, studios would assemble huge marketing campaigns behind their films and it was hard to miss.”

But now? “Primetime television is not what it used to be, the reach of newspapers are not what they used to be — and for a long time that’s where the bulk of advertising was happening, this was the primary way to market to audiences.”

Eventually Facebook and Instagram became, in his words, ” incredibly important.” (Interestingly, he does not mention Twitter.) And when TikTok came along, it changed things once again. “It’s a much less predictable platform than Facebook and Instagram because it’s very tough to figure out how to work the algorithm to be seen.”

For much of the 20th century, marketers could be fairly confident that a campaign would reach people, but that’s not the case anymore. “Marketers don’t have this figured out,” said Calkins. “It’s a very different world and it’s only going to get worse — it’s going to get harder and harder for marketers to ensure that everybody, or a big chunk of the population, sees the same basic message.”

I suspect that’s why there’s so much angst in Hollywood about the Academy Awards losing their status as a must-see event. If the Oscars are little more than an elaborate promotional scheme — and they are, that’s always been their raison d’être — what happens when fewer people care to even tune in? “There’s no question that the decline of the Oscars is a real loss for marketers, because now all you have is the Super Bowl if you want to reach a big audience all at once,” Calkins said.

There are two other factors I think determine whether or not you are hearing about new TV shows and films.

There are so many titles coming out at any given time. That’s a lot of competition for your attention, and some of these titles are going to fall through the cracks. The marketing that is out there may not be penetrating, lost in the fire hose of content.

At the same time, studios, TV networks and streamers are cutting costs and that includes marketing budgets. So in some instances — probably a lot of instances — there’s just less marketing happening. Netflix, for example, has often operated under the premise that the algorithm serving up recommendations is a more effective way to reach audiences than media coverage.

“People are getting upset about not seeing the marketing,” Calkins pointed out, “and that’s a whole different stage of our economy, because for so long people were annoyed by the onslaught of marketing.”

This is funny, because the other day I saw a teaser for a trailer. It was for “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and the trailer was set to drop the following day, so this was … a trailer for the trailer? How absurd!

But I had to stop myself, because at least I saw it. The marketing reached me. Isn’t that what we want? Nobody wants to feel like they’re out of the loop.

“This happened to me just the other day,” Calkins said. “I read about a show on Netflix that I wanted to watch, but I couldn’t remember the name of it offhand. So then I went to try to find it and I couldn’t figure out what show it was. I’d read about it somewhere, but it didn’t have a lot of presence. I had a very rough concept of the show, I think it was a spy show? But I didn’t remember the name or much about it, but I was confident that I could find it later because you always hear about these new shows, right?”

Did he ever find the show?

“No! I still haven’t figured it out.”

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic

nmetz@chicagotribune.com

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