The FOMO Era vs. Movie Marketing (as We Knew It)
It's time to embrace bottom-up, influencer-driven Chicken Jockey novelty — if only Hollywood can figure it out
A couple weeks ago, I stumbled into another viral mob. I say "another" because seeing them isn't a rare occurrence anymore. Viral hordes in search of a new coffee, beanbag or collectible bobblehead are everywhere. In Century City, the mall seemed on the brink of shutting the whole place down and sealing off the zip code when hundreds showed up at 6 a.m. in anticipation of the new, ahem, labubu release.
The mob I ran into stood a little bit further west on a block-and-a-half-long line filing down Sawtelle, waiting to get cups of milk tea from a man in a tiny glass cube which had been stationed alongside the curb. I approached a cluster of young women, taking pictures of themselves holding the ornately-decorated paper cups full of milk tea they had received inside the cube. They had waited in line, they told me, for more than an hour.
I asked how was the drink they had waited so long for. They shrugged. Not very good, one told me.
So, why, I asked, given that there are roughly 200 boba shops within a block of here, did you wait over an hour for it?
The young woman looked at me like I was insane. “For the Instagrams!” They sneered and turned back to photographing themselves with their cups of mediocre milk tea.
As I say, not an uncommon occurrence in the cultural waters today. Our own Matthew Frank has visited this topic with a great pair of stories about the Minecraft phenomenon and Hollywood’s efforts at luring Gen Z in with aggressive memeification. That Gen Z is been driven by these viral moments is a matter of faith at this point. SNL satirized this phenomenon earlier this month — and we all know that influencer culture is a thing.
What occurred to me, however, is as much as it talks about this new reality, how little Hollywood has internalized this new world.