Untraceable's European Facebook Campaign Was Tacky, Just Like the Movie

You have probably forgotten that there was a movie released in January called Untraceable. It starred Diane Lane as an FBI agent pursuing a killer who tortured his victims on a live webcast -- the more people who visited his site, the faster the victim was killed. I tried to spread the rumor that watching the movie would have the same effect on someone and I guess that worked, because the film flopped.

Now that Untraceable has failed in America, Universal is taking it to Europe to fail there, and an unorthodox Internet campaign has raised some eyebrows. Universal's marketing people heard that all the kids were using the Facebook these days, and they really, really wanted young people to see this important movie about torture, murder, and improbable FBI investigations. So they registered a Facebook page for Untraceable where you could see brief clips of one of the movie's torture scenes and rigged it so that -- just like in the movie -- the more people who visited the page, the more of the scene you could watch.

Let me parse that for you. The movie's villain uses the public's prurient interest in violence to kill people: the more people who get off on watching it, the faster the victim dies. In the movie, this is presented as a bad thing, an appalling thing, a shameful indictment of humanity's thirst for bloody entertaining. So to promote the movie, Universal set up a Facebook page capitalizing on that same bloodlust.

Hey, I have an idea! Let's make a movie that pretends to take a dim view of violence, and then show what hypocrites we are by launching an ad campaign that promotes violence!

The happy ending to this story is that Facebook put the kibosh on Untraceable's "Kill With Me" page. According to Variety, Facebook won't allow pages that are "hateful, threatening, or obscene," and the Untraceable stunt qualified as some combination of the three.

Now, you would expect Universal's marketing people to be embarrassed by this. The usual response in this case would be for an executive to say, "We regret our misguided attempt at promoting the film, and we apologize to anyone who was offended." Some low-level staffer would get fired, and life would go on.

But not this time! The idea had come from Picture Production Co., an outside marketing firm contracted by Universal, and PPC's head honcho Dan Light is quoted by Variety as having this response: "I am surprised and disappointed that Facebook has taken this action. These sorts of social media campaigns are the only way to be competitive at the moment."

Let me parse that for you. "Come on, guys! The only way to get kids' attention these days is to be distasteful and exploitative! Sure, it's creepy, but what do you want us to do? Stop marketing torture porn to young people? Come on!"

So to Dan Light and Picture Production Co.: You're all tools. To Untraceable: I think I'll go back to forgetting you existed.

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Eric D. Snider's website never killed anybody. Well, OK, one guy, but that was self-defense.

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