MySpace as movie promo page? Ah, no.

Remember that universally-accepted e-commerce dictum of having traffic be driven to your web storefront largely because of good design (CSS, color scheme, fonts) and savvy marketing (good domain name, proper URL promotion)? The basic principle was that skimping on online work would kill your business, with people getting a negative image of your company based on the implied low-budget nature of your web presence.

Well, I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw a TV commercial for "John Tucker Must Die" and noticed the URL plugging the movie pointing to MySpace. I wasn't planning on seeing the flick, and after the spot, I'm even more movitated to steer clear from whatever cineplex is spinning it. My first impression was of a movie so bad, it didn't even want to fork out a miniscule amount of dough for even a Flash-driven domain and site. Geez, even the cheesiest horror flicks have decent sites. This in my mind, redefined piss-poor product promotion - an effort so low-budget that it's an insult to low-budget.

However, out of curiosity I browsed over to the MySpace page and was duly impressed at the slick marketing concept - John Tucker's profile page with his various lady callers as friends in his network. Freakin' genius. It's incredibly clever how they've weaved the storyline into how most kids today enjoy social behavior, and the leveraging of MySpace's social networking function by adding friends. Really, really, clever. I'm pissed I didn't think of this first. (And this crow I'm now forced to eat ain't half bad.)

Chalk this one up as great, creative thinking. But what bothers me is that I'm sure other not-so-forward-thinking marketers are going to take the MySpace-as-promo-site approach and actually half-ass it. Let's hope people see this for what it really is, and not a zero-cost alternative to actually putting good push behind a product.

Bravo, Fox.