Announcement: The #GoBarsoom digital grassroots media campaign for John Carter

Andrew Stanton, John Carter News

The #GoBarsoom digital grassroots media campaign is about to happen.  Here’s what it’s all about.

Yesterday we wrote about how motivated fans can actually make a difference to the success or failure of John Carter.   Then yesterday the John Carter Files Fan Trailer we had made a couple of weeks ago got discovered and has been tweeted and retweeted thousands of times, and is being picked up and carried on about 30 different movie websites — so we’re getting a taste of how we all do have a chance to make a difference even if we don’t always feel like that’s the case.

Now we’re taking it a step further — Andrew Stanton coined #gobarsoom as a hashtag on Twitter and we’re  turning it into a grassroots publicity campaign in which motivated Edgar Rice Burroughs fans can reach out to local media in your area and trigger articles about the movie/book/fan/reading project connection — or you can blog, post to your FB page, tweet, whatever.  Bottom line is we’re going to try and do what we can to make it possible for people to  “Use Your Voice and Be Heard”!

The John Carter Files Digital Press Kit will go online later today

Today we’re going to be putting up a digital press kit so that way it will work is that when a fan reaches out (and if we know a fan is interested, we will make the call to the media outlet if the fan is shy about it.), aside from doing an interview about their lifetime love of the books and their hopes for the movies, the media outlet will have access to a full range of materials about Edgar Rice Burroughts, the history of John Carter as a book series, the history of efforts to make it into a movie — plus art examples, quotes from people who were influenced by ERB (Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, etc).  All of this, plus HD videos that can be downloaded so that the media outlet has everything it needs to craft a good story.

This is all meant to supplement and help what Disney is doing.  Our orientation is a little different — first of all, we’re coming from the place of being fans of the underlying material and hoping that the outcome of the movie is not just that it’s a successful movie and generates sequels — but that it generates renewed interest in all the amazing imaginative works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  So our thrust isn’t just to pimp the movie, although we’re certainly hoping to boost it, but to create in the mind of the potential audience the connection between Andrew Stanton’s interpretation of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the works of ERB himself.

More later. I want to get this out so people know what’s coming and can start thinking about it.  Time is short — newspapers in particular have longer lead times than they really should in this day and age, and we’re coming up on deadlines right now for the Sunday 10 days from now that is the Sunday before the movie comes out.  Big Sunday articles aren’t the only thing, though — we’ll take something that comes out closer to when the movie opens, and we’ll take radio interviews, and of course local TV segments.  All of those are great for what we’re trying to do.

Onward!

2 comments

  • An explanation about lead times for newspaper entertainment sections:

    Entertainment sections are generally “early runs;” i.e., they are printed in advance of the Sunday paper. At the Midland Reporter-Telegram, where my wife is managing editor, the entertainment section is printed on a Thursday night for the following Sunday. Deadlines for interior “briefs” may be as late as a Wednesday or a Thursday morning, but deadline for the section cover is earlier.

    It’s essential that entertainment editors be contacted as soon as possible. The only place for a JC promo article would probably be a section cover, and section covers are planned ahead of time, not thrown together spur-of-the-moment.

    Time is of the essence.

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