Jeremiah Tolbert

First off, let me say that I’m very proud of the work I do for my clients, even when it’s a more tra­di­tional marketing-​​based project. I enjoy mak­ing ads and web­sites, and I don’t see myself ever stop­ping build­ing and refin­ing those things.

The Subterrene War Clips rep­re­sent an evo­lu­tion of an idea, a semi-​​new way of mar­ket­ing books for my busi­ness, that I want to see suc­ceed very badly, because I think it can be a pos­i­tive, pow­er­ful new thing.

We’ve been care­ful to not use the word “book trailer” when we talk about the videos, because from the begin­ning, we were aim­ing for some­thing dif­fer­ent. So many book trail­ers are teasers for some­thing, and not a cohe­sive project in and of itself. And often times, they’re pretty sta­tic, which is under­stand­able, given they’re usu­ally pro­duced by an author with a micro­phone and some edit­ing software.

Marketing, in my mind, does not have to be all about the project you’re mar­ket­ing (but the road should cer­tainly lead there). I believe, that mar­ket­ing projects can be about orig­i­nal, cre­ative work too. These videos are enter­tain­ment with a pur­pose in mind, but still– I want to cre­ate mar­ket­ing that is more than just an adver­tise­ment (BUY NOW! IN STORES TODAY). I want the process of sell­ing you on some­thing  to be an enjoy­able expe­ri­ence itself.

And that’s why the Subterrene War Clips are struc­tured and cre­ated the way they are. Orbit was inter­ested in this idea too, I think, or they wouldn’t have backed the project from the begin­ning.  (Thank you to the team at Orbit for agree­ing to try this experiment!)

To a cer­tain degree, it’s also about mak­ing mar­ket­ing a lit­tle less obnox­ious. Marketing is a dirty word to a lot of peo­ple, even me to a small degree. But it’s impor­tant. We need mar­ket­ing (even just old-​​fashioned word-​​of-​​mouth) to help us iden­tify the things we want to buy, so it’s not all bad.  We like mar­ket­ing that helps us buy some­thing we actu­ally like.  I fig­ure, if we can make the expe­ri­ence of being mar­keted towards more worth­while as an expe­ri­ence itself, it might lessen some of that negativity.

This project is also about carv­ing out another cre­ative mar­ket space for my fel­low cre­atives; one where peo­ple from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines can inter­act and work to accom­plish a project together that helps pro­mote a good book. We had actors, writ­ers, design­ers, and video­g­ra­phers all coop­er­at­ing on this project to make some­thing none of us could cre­ate on our own. Its rare that new oppor­tu­ni­ties for paid work in these spaces pop up in our busi­ness; so books mar­ket­ing in par­tic­u­lar seems like a great place to take this kind of work.

This is not to say that “mar­ket­ing as enter­tain­ment” is a unique idea, never tried before. But it’s new to me, rarer in the pub­lish­ing world, and I really believe that it can be a bet­ter solu­tion than buy­ing ads in a mag­a­zine or on Google.

So that’s a bit about the why and the pas­sion behind it all instead.  This is why I feel so invested in their suc­cess.   Because I love books and I want peo­ple to read them. If I could ded­i­cate my life to help­ing peo­ple find the right books to read, I would. And in my own way, that’s pretty much what I am doing. That’s why I worked for months on these.

Maybe you think I should just stick to cod­ing web­sites  and leave this kind of cre­ative explo­ration to the real mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als?  Maybe so.  But if you’ve  enjoyed the video short sto­ries, please share them via your own blogs and social sites.  If you want to see more mar­ket­ing projects like this one, tell the us with your clicks and eye­balls; with your own per­sonal soapboxes.

And thank you to those of you who have already shared and talked about the video short sto­ries.  You guys are the best!

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