Algorithm and Blues

A long time ago in a galaxy far away when I was a writer working on Coca-Cola the talent agency CAA or rather Michael Ovitz the über-agent to the stars at CAA decided that Hollywoodland could do a better job of advertising than Madison Avenue. He figured that having sway with the cream of directors cinematographers scriptwriters and actors gave him an advantage. His pitch was enticing. `Ladies and Gentlemen , imagine if you will the vision of Francis Ford Coppola, the humor of Rob Reiner,the energy of Richard Donner….yadda yada yada.’ Well I can’t remember if Coppola actually got to shoot one since he had previously shot a spot for General Motors which that client considered un-airable and the Coke folks were gun-shy after seeing why. I do remember that the most lasting thing to come out of this exercise was the animated Polar Bears. A wise man (as opposed to wise guy) at McCann called Bruce Nelson said to me at the time how crazy it was for the  Coke client to fall for  CAA’s story since if an ad agency had the same success rate as the movie biz we’d all be out of business in a month. The movie hit and miss ratio was and still is pretty awful. Which is why it was interesting to read in the New York Times today about Vinny Bruzzese (now that sounds like a wise guy) chief executive of Worldwide Motion Picture Group who is bringing analytics to evaluate movie scripts and better predict if they will be boffo or bombs. He and his team of data demons compare story structure and genre of a script and use a database of focus group results for similar movies and also surveys 1500 potential moviegoers. He has already been hired to analyze over 100 scripts and his magic algorithms were apparently instrumental in  tweaking movies such as `Oz the Great and Powerful’. I’m sure that feelings are mixed. Scriptwriters who get thumbs up from Vinny will say it’s great and those who get the thumbs down will be unhappy. I agree with those who are concerned that it will bring a greater degree of conformity to an industry with a microscopic comfort zone. I think it would be a great exercise to try a little blind testing and provide him with scripts from original and critically acclaimed movies and see how they fare under the scrutiny of Vinny’s successo-meter. I can also see his analytics being incorporated into script writing software so that just as you type in `Open in a bowling alley’ a box will pop up to remind you that the success rate of movies with bowling scenes is  2% and can you change it from bowling alley to laundromat because the success rate there is 78%. That would be both fun and useful. Ahh but then in the very same issue of  The New York Times I saw the perfect opportunity for Vinny to make it magillah big. The article was about how media giants like Condé Nast were creating their own on-line content and looking for advertisers to buy into them in the same way they buy into broadcast programming. One such piece of `content’ was a series in which Vogue person Hamish Bowles is seen shopping his way around the world. Yahoo has created an on-line series with actor John Stamos interviewing other `celebrities’ about where when and how they lost their virginity. This is the perfect place to bring in Vinny and testing. There is such a rush now to throw` content’ on the internet thinking that there’s an audience just sitting around waiting for it and willing to drop the daily dose of Word with Friends or Angry Birds for 20 minutes of Hamish trying to decide between floral and stripes. Content is in danger of just being content pollution. Which is something I'm very discontent about. It’s stuff I don’t want to see getting in the way of stuff I want to get to. If agencies and now studios are pre-testing their work doesn’t it make sense for media companies to do the same. Vinny’s analyzer offers the perfect way to measure if any this `content’ has any value. At the least it could spare us from seeing Hamish buying bowling shoes.