Great idea, poorly executed

With the release of The Simpsons Movie just around the corner, there have been all kinds of promotions thrown at us over the past weeks. From rebranding 7-11s around the country to QuickEMarts to a couple of websites, their is no lack of market awareness. One of the problems with so much promotional material has been some of the lack of QA in the production pipeline.

The Simpsons Movie site is a great bit of entertainment, although there are far too many "Coming Soon" placeholders for my taste. A web site is constantly evolving and adding tags like that just showcase the lack of planning and foresight by the marketing execs involved with this production. I can accept that, however, because the items they have on the site are engaging and work. That cannot be said for one of the more recent additions to Springfield.

There is another Simpsons site that allows you to upload a photo and have it "Simpsonized". This site is a complete hit or miss; actually it's a miss. I have been trying to get something to work on the site since I discovered it over the weekend. Not once, in literally almost 50 attempts, has proved fruitful (those 50 attempts do not include the times the site did allow entry; either by error request or session control).

This would be an example of how not to do a movie tie-in. The site leaves the visitor with nothing but frustration and nothing of the "reason to believe" marketing folks so often use in their creative briefs. This launch date for the movie was established long ago, yet like so many ill-conceived promotions, they did not allow enough time to produce the products to the level that the market has come to expect from a global entertainment company.

For example compare the Simpsons movie site with Disney/Pixars Ratatouille. Hands down, the mouse or in this case the rat, delivers on the promise. Now, I don't want to say the Simpsons have jumped the shark, but I think the lack of attention to some of these major promotional materials does not bode well for the Simpsons (both the movie and the recent lackluster seasons).