I don’t want Netflix Sending the Undead to my Home
March 19th, 2007 by Brian
One week ago I was reading an article at the New York Times website. As I finished reading I clicked my del.icio.us browser button to take me to my bookmarks so I could go to another site. As I clicked, an ad on the Times’ page caught my eye. I only had about a second to view it before the page disappeared so that my bookmarks could load. What I thought I saw was two really creepy looking old people alongside a netflix logo. In the brief glimpse I got they appeared to me to be diseased. The lady in the ad was smiling but the man appeared to be making a crazy face. The impression was enough to trip my mental “wtf” alarm and I frantically clicked the “back” button on my browser. Unfortunately the site I had been viewing was coded to run different ads on each page impression and the Netflix ad was replaced by something else. I reloaded a few times and still failed to see the ad again. I gave up and moved on.
Today I decided to try again. I headed over to the New York Times and clicked on an article in their technology section. Success! On my first try I found the ad. I did a screencap and uploaded it since it turned out to be a flash ad.
Ok, so my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me! This ad really does feature a pair of fucked up, corroded old people. Why would they think this would make me want to use Netflix? I used the flash control to replay the ad and discovered that before it displays the image you see above it runs through an animation of the words “knock knock, guess who’s coming over” or something like that. Finally I started to understand. Are we to believe that these are zombies? I’m not so sure about that. First of all, zombies don’t knock on your door. They pound on it tirelessly for days until it collapses. Second, zombies don’t smile. Assuming their facial muscles are intact they would lack the motor skills to form a smile.
I dug a little deeper and looked for Netflix’s recent TV ads. You’ve probably seen them. They operate on the premise that Netflix sends actual characters from the movies to your house. For example “I’m that action movie you ordered from Netflix” says the Indiana Jones looking guy. In a recent commercial featuring such characters in a classroom setting, a zombie can clearly be seen among the pupils! So it appears that the things in this ad ARE zombies!
Netflix obviously needs to learn a thing or two about zombies. My impression of the ad is that grandma and gramps have leprosy and Netflix shipped them to your house for reasons unknown.
hahaha!
That is a damn creepy ad though i admit.
I gotta tell you dude, I did a google just now for something envolving this ad, because I saw it two weeks prior too today and then it pops up on Yahoo!’s movie previews section. I hate this damn ad! It fucking freaks me out. I deffinitely will not be using Netflix due to this stupid, lame ass attempt to scare (or scam) people into using their service.
I had the same reaction and sent a complaint letter to them. Just like many advertizers know sex sells, the makers of this ad know that death sells as well. People are hardcoded to react strongly to images of either.
Showing the ‘undead’ with emotion screws up our emotional circutry and forces us to figure out what’s going on–no doubt the same cognitive dissonance that has driven the zombie movie franchise.
That they are appealing to the rubberneck-at-accidents demographic (i.e. all of us at our worst) has lost them at least one potential customer–me. As ingenious as their business model may be, I will save my money for companies, non-profits, etc. that appeal to the best of us.
Oh don’t get me wrong. I think Netflix is great even though I no longer subscribe.
I don’t object to the use of zombies in the ad. I DO object to the fact that the ad blatantly defies Zombie canon as set down by Romero in film and Max Brooks in print.
Absolutely C McCormick,
I do agree with everything that you have said. It made me look several minutes at the picture, thinking, “what in the world is this, and why is it so scary?” If people want to watch horror movies, pictures, etc, that is ok. But to put it in someones face unexpectedly on a webpage is unexcusable.
I found this post when I googled “crazy netflix ads” because I had been seeing the ad on nytimes.com for a while and wanted to learn more about it.
The ad did not offend me at all, I did not even think of being offended, which is interesting considering some of the other comments listed here. After reading those comments I can totally understand why someone could be offended and I do not criticize those reactions at all. As well, all the reasons that I read illustrate what I consider admirable sentiments.
I think I was not offended because I immediately interpreted the figures as wearing make=up or obvious CGI, I saw them as unrealistic, though very well done, movie characters. That along with the bright and red Netflix logo, led me to put the image in a 99 percent sure it was harmless context right way. Which would have been truly the “car accident” instinct. I believe my instinct to turn back was more like, “WTF?” as stated earlier. This has a distinct “some thing is totally screwy with that ad” rather than a “Horror/car-accident” reaction. I am fairly certain Netflix would never want to appeal to the latter. They would be spending so much money to have you associate them with death and diseased grandparents? I think it would be obvious to them at the outset that such strategy would most certainly cause some people to HATE them or be disgusted by them.
If they knew they would cause such feelings of horror I would be loathe to support them. But that would seem to be such a completely incompetent (those this may only be in 20/20 hindsight) marketing move.
IF they thought there images would provoke the WTF? but not horror/violence etc it does not seem to make sense to be angry at them for anything worse than a possibly poor marketing choice.
My 2 cents just thrown out there for consideration and dialouge. I certainly do not purport to have difnitive opions about the subject.
COMMENT ADDED: I just re-read my post above and some of the other comments and now I am jut not sure of Netflix intentions. Would be cool to get a response from Netflix.
Jason
Jason,
Yes, it is good that you went back and re-read the comments. The fact that the ad just appears unexpectedly on a webpage that someone is looking at is just not fair. I happen to have a propensity to have such images linger in my mind for days, and I am saddened by the fact that Netflix did not think about people like me. This type of horror movie imagery should only appear on like-minded websites, not on news sites, etc.