(MPAA, 4 May 2006)
I have it on good authority that the MPAA intend this commercial to discourage movie piracy, rather than, as it appears, to encourage car theft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU
One marvels that such advertisements make it past their first test screening, let alone into the forefront of a multimillion-dollar crusade against copyright infringement. The average viewer must jump ship at the first premise:
“You wouldn’t steal a car.”
I would if it belonged to Sony. The first car, I’d steal to drive. The second one, I’d set fire to and photograph burning on a stolen Sony camera, so that later I could send them the pictures of me laughing watching it burn.
Yeah that whole campaign never made much sense to me. The process of downloading a movie is ludicrously fast, especially considering the ad’s been around since the early 2000s. It makes pirates seem like hardened street criminals, lending them an aura of coolness. A far better campaign might have been to point out that early 2000s file-sharing was a really fast way to turn your computer into an expensive brick.
:)
I don’t know much about advertising, but I would’ve thought that even when you present it as a video montage, a successful argument still needs premisses the viewer will accept