Information Disorders Applied to Film Marketing: Promotion of A Cure for Wellness (Verbinski, 2016) Based on Fake News
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2024.0505Keywords:
Information Disorders, Disinformation, Misinformation, Fake News, Fake Newspaper, Marketing, Film Promotion, Film Websites, Tie-In Websites, Cinema, Transmedia, Virtual Archaeology, Wayback MachineAbstract
Despite the extensive attention that information disorders have received in the academic field, the intersections between this phenomenon and film marketing have not yet been examined. To fill this gap, this research analyzesthe campaign based on five fake newspapers and fake news orchestrated by 20th Century Fox and Regency Enterprises to promote A Cure for Wellness of Verbinski, 2016. Starting from this case, ourmain objective is to analyze the promotional campaign of a film based on information disorders. At a methodological level, initially, virtual archeology work was carried out using the Wayback Machine to recover the websites that constituted the fakemedia and identify all the fake news used in the aforementioned campaign. Thereupon, using the content analysis technique, we examined the 140 fake news identified by applying an analysis template designed specifically for this study. The results reveal that the fake news barely established connections with the film, although these were usually consistent with its subject matter. Likewise, the fake news, which were essentially cloned in the various fake media, are surrounded by advertising of the film and include images from Shutterstock, fake and real quotes and sources, as well as hashtags related to the film and politics. This unprecedented marketing application of information disorders generates a new type of reception that we have called “disruptive”, which uses disinformation to replace the user's reality with a false reality thatis largely disconnected from the cultural artifact to be promoted.
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