Creating a Dedicated Marketing Subpage

This is a thought I have had for a long time, a specific Marketing page paired for work pages. This would be basically a fourth "core" page alongside the main page, trivia and ymmv. Among the content that would go in this page would be tropes that involve trailers, advertising campaigns, merchandise, tie-in materials as well as tropes USED by those materials. In general this would apply to content not applicable to the work directly, ie you are at a friends house and watch a movie you never heard of before, while you know the content of the movie you have no frame of reference for the tv tropes page talking about the trailers, art book, toyline and ARG viral marketing. Note that the current Advertising page is a work category.

This originated because I would notice editors get really particular over examples listed for pre-release works, either delete it, %% the bullet point or rewrite to specify the trailer it is coming from. Issue is that once the work is released this results in a lot of sloppy examples mentioning "in the Comic-Con Trailer" for a work that was five years old, which dates when the example was written and violates Examples Are Not Recent. A related idea is making a policy the work page won't receive any examples until release, content related to the promotion can be relegated to the Marketing page but that would be a whole different conversation. Similarly a lot of tropes that compare trailer / merchandise to the released work are inconsistent between the main page and trivia page, Missing Trailer Scene is trivia and Never Trust a Trailer is main page even though both are about relationships between the work and trailer (wouldn't be difficult to rationalize the reason why, but a Marketing Tab would fix any confusion outright).

I am fully aware this would be a monumental job, combing over thousands of wicks and works to parse out and organize the appropriate tropes in their new location. Things such as deciding the official name of the page, making a new icon and modifying the site code is trivial in comparison. I figured I would present the idea and see what others think of it.

I've felt the same way for some time, and you've articulated a lot of my own feelings rather well.

I feel like such a move would also cut down on Speculative Troping as pre-release examples would be segregated to a subpage.

One other issue is that trailer tropes aren't part of the work they purport to describe. To give a specific example, every trailer for Thor: Ragnarok prominently featured the Incredible Hulk, but the movie itself builds it up as a big surprise. Pretty clear example if Trailers Always Spoil.

But Trailers Always Spoil isn't Trivia, and goes on the main work page. So show me where, in the runtime of Thor: Ragnarok, the audience is spoiled for the Hulk's appearance. It's not his big entrance, because he hasn't been seen at all up to that point, and has only been referred to by the new characters as the greatest champion. In fact, at no point in the movie does a trailer spoil the big surprise; the only spoilers are outside the movie, in the trailer. This means that we are troping things on work pages that don't happen in the work.

So that's another reason I'm in favour of this.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Jun 20th 2023 at 2:34:50 PM

Part of me thinks any advertising-related tropes would all go on trivia instead, as they have before. And when a work's released, would tropers actually be willing to move applicable pre-release examples back to the main page? Could that just cause more confusion? Would a trope that applies to both a scene in a trailer and the final film be on both pages?

And as for tie-in material, would that only apply to direct novelizations or, in rare cases, original novels starring the same characters?

As someone who's written examples for Smash Bris reveal trailers, this would be a huge boon. Thirding.

Expand it to paratext in general and it could address a lot of issues around Title Tropes and Cover Tropes, too.

(Though some forms of paratext get questionable whether they're "separate" from the story - In-Scene Title Text, Paradiegetic Gameplay, Fun with Subtitles, etc. I suppose the same question exists for advertising, though - after all, the trailer before the film starts is just as much part of the story as the Hilarious Outtakes after the credits, and they'll share space on DVD.)

Trivia and YMMV are categories of tropes; if a trope is designated as YMMV it only goes on the main page if it's used in-universe, and a trope that's designated as belonging on the main page never gets examples posted on the Trivia or YMMV subpages. Some tropes, like Never Trust a Trailer, would be specific to a Marketing namespace, but others would be ordinary tropes that happen to apply to the trailer or merchandise. So the comparison to Trivia and YMMV isn't exact. It almost seems like the best comparison for what's being proposed is a new kind of work page.

There was an attempt at something like this during the initial pre-release troping debate. You can read the discussion afterward to see how well it went over.

I might have overcomplicated things a little bit, but the core idea of the marketing page is to separate the tropes that are about the relationship between the work and the advertising for it, as the advertising isn't evident within the work by itself. This ranges from All There in the Manual to Never Trust a Trailer. Previously I felt that all marketing-centric tropes should be trivia, but in truth there is some artistic narrative involved with those tropes while trivia is meant to be more behind-the-scenes "fun facts."

The complicated part is a number of tie-in works probably should have its' own work page, just that most people aren't motivated to make one for a 15 page comic book. In the absence of a work page editors will put in tropes examples on the primary work. That's where the discussion of policy and how it can intersect with the other pages will be needed.

As with other namespace/subpage talks, it would be easier to argue for or against the idea if some proof of concept gets compiled in a sandbox.

But in general I find the idea of separating "not in the work's content but in supplementary material" examples interesting.

It reminds me of our idea to put marketing content in a separate folder for prerelease purposes.

I put together a quick sandbox as a proof of concept. Used the recent Transformers film due having a prominent toyline, minimal editing just to focus on what is in the trailers versus the movie itself (Unicron is revealed early, so Optimus' learning Unicron is involved is not a Wham Line in the movie). Sandbox Marketing Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

Works as a proof of concept! Might take a closer look later, but this proves to me the idea has merit.

Like it.

I like it

Really, really late, but the sandbox looks good.

I combed over just the trivia index and created a sandbox for a Marketing Index to get a gauge of how many pages we are looking at. May check out other indexes including derivative works, media adaptation tropes and advertising tropes, so it's maybe about half now. There will likely be some confusion what the exact scope this will entail, so feel free to bring up what does or doesn't count. I generally used the criteria of:

• Anything associated with Trailers and Marketing (Never Trust a Trailer, Missing Trailer Scene)
• Anything associated with Tie-In Materials (Licensed Game, Tie-In Cereal)
• Anything associated with Release Dates, Release Locations, Medium Release and Format Scheduling (Release Date Change, Banned in China, Vaporware)
• Anything associated with the actual Merchandise and Licensed Products (Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy, )
• Localization quirks (Translation Correction, Recursive Import)
• Content released outside of the format of the work (DVD Commentary, Concept Art)
• Material that was created for the work but removed, with evidence of existence coming from any of the above (Focus Group Ending, Deleted Role)

I'll be honest, I'm not sure how much traction this will get since it has to be a team effort. If any mods have something to say that would be helpful.