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Can Audiences Be Bothered by 'Crowd Gaming'?

by Jason Louv on June 28th, 2007   Comments [0]

If paying eleven dollars for a movie ticket and twice as much for a soda and popcorn weren't enough to drive you away from the movie theater and back to your television and NetFlix account, there's always pre-movie advertising to drive you away. Twenty minutes of commercials and trailers preceded by a monotonous montage of slide ads is enough to make anybody's eyes glaze over even before they subject themselves to Hollywood's latest focus-group produced, paint-by-the-numbers "hit."

MSNBC is throwing a spanner in the works with interactive theater ads: their initial effort, a version of Breakout which displays news headlines, and is controlled by how audiences move in their seats, will either set a new standard for pre-film advertising or add even more inanity to the mix. (See a video here.)

Eliciting crowd participation in theaters recalls the early-nineties hype around interactive movies, a genre which quickly tanked, or even the in-theater gimmicks used for 1950s grindhouse pics by directors like William Castle. Yet each of these attempts to engage audiences has revealed a basic truth: people don't want to be bothered with such stressors while they passively consume. Time will tell whether innovations like MSNBC's will last.

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