We’ve spent a big part of this week locating bloggers and reviewers who we think would have a big impact selling the show.   My daughter observed something interesting about what I would call the “power girl bloggers.”   These are women, ages 15-30, who blog about romance, parenting, fashion, and pop culture with a ratio of about 80% pictures to 20% commentary.   The observation is usually witty stuff — well-coined captions and amiable little chronicles of the ridiculous — and my guess is that they have audiences who are addicted to the daily comic strip value of the posts.

They get “sponsors” for their blogs, not Google Ads, (which you can’t control and which don’t pay very well).    This decision means they effectively have their own sales department and it doesn’t really look commercial.  You are “sponsoring” the blog, the way you would, say, a charity runner, racing for the cure.  Weird little ads for abortion services don’t show up if you happen to talk politics.   The affinity between the advertiser (I mean “sponsor”) and the blogger is more spiritual than the text-scanning algorithms of the ad placement techies.    I was always attracted to the Google Ads thing because you just blog away and Google figures out what ads would be appropriate, but there is no getting around sales.   You can’t just offload that task to Google.   They’ll take all the money and you’ll never get to know your audience — which brings me, in a round-about fashion to my current challenge — getting a few of these smart ladies to talk about and review “Courage.”   They may be much more effective than the really big movie critics.

Simply put, it’s not easy getting the attention of big reviewers.  The media engines who review culture are just as moved by money as the rest of us, even the ones who claim to be looking out for independents.   Suppose you set up shop, for example, as a reviewer of movies targeted at adolescents.   The big studios put out their usual nonsense and you spend a lot of time ridiculing that nonsense.   In that sense, you may be serving your public, but the culture menu becomes fixed and immovable by that very dynamic.   The message becomes “these are our only choices and show X is slightly better than Y or Z.”   Next year the choices get even worse and the very criticsm itself becomes the means by which bad product is nurtured.  I know the audience-building reality of this, from personal experience, because when the Huffington Post was bashing “Courage” (without ever watching it), I was having a good chuckle.  The DVD orders were pouring in on screen right as the Huffington Post lackeys were raging on screen left.  The more they fulminated, the more we sold.  In this case, of course, it was all working in reverse: really shallow people were building an audience for something really deep, (in my humble opinion.)

But as for the culture-defending reviewers, it’s like this…while those guardian of good story-telling were bashing the studios for their really bad movie, there was another little guy screaming, “heah, take a look at my story!  Give me as much space as that $300 million 3D gimmick depicting space explorers as ravagers of big-eyed, blue-skinned natives.”   And of course the guardian of culture, by ignoring the screaming independent, actually expanded the audience of the hi-tech, culture-challenged ex-grip who never heard of Flannery O’Connor.

Sorry. I let the inner snob out of his dungeon.  Someone tell him to get back in there and finish the script.