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Friday, March 29, 2024

When you swipe right on a movie character

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Last month, Madonna famously used the gay dating app Grindr to promote her album Rebel Heart. She also turned to Snapchat to premiere the full music video of the song “Living For Love.” Using social apps to generate buzz for new projects is nothing new in the entertainment industry. But the singer one-upped the others because she went beyond the now-common practice of making announcements via Twitter and posting audio/video snippets on Instagram.

But sometimes, social media marketing campaigns are taken so far away from the realm of familiarity that they end up right at the border of genius and creepy—and it gets really difficult to tell where genius ends and creepy begins.

Image lifted from the Adweek Web site

At the South by Southwest festivals in Austin, Texas, many Tinder users found themselves chatting with a beautiful woman named Ava. Turns out, Ava is a bot, a computer program designed to perform automated tasks. When used within messaging Web sites and apps, they can be programmed to act like humans and respond to chats the way a real person would.

 Bots on Tinder mostly send spam messages that advertise porn sites and gaming apps, but Ava is different. The account was created to promote the sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, which was screened at SXSW on Saturday, ahead of its American theatrical release. The photograph on the profile belongs to Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who plays the humanoid artificial intelligence Ava in the movie.

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According to Adweek, Ava’s Tinder modus operandi is engaging right-swipers in conversation by asking them a series of getting-to-know questions about love, humanity and physical attraction. “You’ve passed my test,” she will say after you’ve answered her questions. She will then instruct you to “take a look at my Instagram, and let me know if I’ve passed yours.” Ava does not mention the movie at all during the chat.

 But when one views @meetava on Instagram, they’ll find two images and one clip—all promoting Ex Machina—and a link to the movie’s Web site. That’s when the clueless chatter realizes that they’ve just been played. All this time, they haven’t been hitting it off with a beautiful woman. Instead, they were on the receiving end of a clever, if not ruthless, marketing ploy.

 In marketing, engaging your audience is paramount. This campaign accomplishes that flawlessly, making it effective and really quite brilliant. But it does so in a deceptive manner, getting people’s hopes up and at best, slightly bruising their egos in the process, which is kind of cruel. And so we’re left to wonder: Is this stunt amazing or is it appalling? Then again, we have to admit these two adjectives are not mutually exclusive.

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