#highly likely this is act 3 and someone from netflix made a mistake

[arcanegifs]

Ne ratez pas le chapitre final de la série primée Arcane. La saison 2 d'Arcane arrive le 9 novembre, seulement sur Netflix | content source deleted

[feeltheblaziker]

Arctic Dogs Movie Review/Rant

So... that movie made me come out of Tumblr retirement, eh? 

If you want to see my review of Arctic Dogs, check out my review at: https://boxd.it/10CTln. Otherwise, if you want to continue reading that review on Tumblr, sigh...

Story and Writing: 0/5 Animation: 0/5 Characters and Voice Acting: 0/5 Score and soundtrack: 0/5 Overall Score: 0/20 Rating: Burn in Hell (0/5) Song: "Look Away" by Darude feat. Sebastian Rejman - youtu.be/B5hBZC-SIsE

The lazy movie poster with the Clipart-grade title card (I refused to call it a movie poster) says it all. It's the worst animated movie of 2019.

Arctic Dogs (or Arctic Justice) is what happens when Battlefield Earth, Aloha, United Passions and Norm of the North all gangbang each other to give birth to the ultimate form of animated movie cringe. I had to see it in theatres for a student price of S$6.50 (or $4.70 USD) and I wish I had my 90 plus minutes and that ticket price back. Heck, even I would want my free ticket back if I have one. So, how bad was it? (Spoiler alert: EVERYTHING)

Story and Writing:

Usually, I would put up a small spoiler-free summary of the movie, but I'm gonna go straight to the chase: it's the worst story of all the animated movies in 2019, period. Even worse than Norm of the North 2.

The story offers nothing new and it featured one of the worst, if not the worst animated movie protagonist of recent memory (We'll talk about him later). It also didn't help that because of the terrible 'writing' that was filled with cringe-worthy 'comedy' and a cliche-heavy script with extremely unbearable dialogue that sometimes don't make sense, not to mention the 90 plus minute runtime felt like three hours (yes, I swore I stayed in the theatre for 3 hours). I watched it in a threate (the biggest mistake I have ever made in my entire life) with my best friend and after the first twenty minutes, he gave up and played a video game on his mobile phone.

To call it 'writing' or even 'first-draft writing' is an insult to the art of animated movie writing or lack thereof. It was such an amazement into how this quality of writing was accepted and greenlit for a wide release animated movie, especially when the writers had written the scripts for Escape from Planet Earth and The Nut Job 2!

Animation:

It doesn't help that it's the same studio behind the Norm series that was in charge of the animation and what I saw was incredible: glitchy animation that looked like it was only halfway through production. In addition, the character designs looked bland, the effects cheap and nasty and the background animation non-existent.

Also, character movement, while acceptable, are not well-animated and the fur animation is half-baked. There are times where the dialogue is out of sync with the mouth movements, a clear sign it's a low budget animated movie (and not one with $50 million US dollars).

I may not be an animation student, but even I would be able to pinpoint the many animation flaws within the movie For a movie on $50 million USD, it should have the budget for a decent, generic animation, but I got unfinished C-grade animation, which is an insult even to the price of the student ticket in Singapore, especially when the easiest element to animate, snow, is so artifical I could easily compare it to Norm of the North (which was made by that same studio).

Characters and Voice Acting:

To talk about how terrible Swifty is as a protagonist is going to be the length of a 2,000-word essay (yes, Swifty was such a terible protagonist I have a whole lot to say about him), so I'm going to say this: Swifty is a terrible role model to kids because he takes advantage of someone's misfortunes without caring for the consequences, nor taking a moment to reflect on his actions. TL:DR, he's an egoistic bastard.

Jade, Swifty's love interest, had a terrible accent that also nothing engaging (Heidi Klum, as much of a nice lady she is, should never be allowed to voice act again), PB was fine but nothing special (actually, I take it back, he's the only bearable charater in the entire movie, pun intended), Magda was the Russian-accented caribou (NOT A MOOSE), Lemmy was supper annoying (was Franco smoking weed while voice acting, as per usual?) and the two French conspiracy theorist otters, Leopold and Bertha, were even more annoying (It doesn't help that Leopold was voiced by Omar Sy, a fantastic French actor who doesn't deserve to voice Norm in the French dub of Norm 1, and Berths was voiced by Klum... again, except even worse).

Otto, as the antagonist, was one-dimensional. And his puffins are rip-offs to the minions. I didn't even mention the Top Dogs, particularly Michael Madsen, who instead of cutting people's ears is delivering mail. Great.

What's even worse is the voice acting. What's the point of hiring well-known actors when they not only cannot voice well, but they made their characters even worse and unbearable? Their voice acting is so half assed, it's not even funny. However, at least Cleese did a fantastic job voicing Otto, even if he's a one-dimensional villain.

Score and soundtrack:

The David Buckley score felt obnoxiously grand because of how terrible the movie was in the first place. However, it's the soundtrack that had me at a loss at words... for all the wrong reasons.

There are 5 Renner songs in the first place. FIVE.

While I applaud Renner's efforts (consiering it's not his first time making music, and "Main Attraction" is not a terrible song in spite of it being an Imagine Dragons reject song), the problem is that all his songs were not only out of place, but up the cringe factor of the entire movie. One of my friends (who only listened to the soundtrack) commented that it's such a dissociation from the Renner I knew from Avengers and Arrival.

This is especially so for "Believer", which highlights Swifty's ego and arrogance, so much so that when I listened to the soundtrack on a train ride home, it was so annoying that I thought my newly bought earphones felt broken. No, I'm not kidding. (The earphones are the AKG-tuned Samsung ones you get when you bought a Samsung phone, and this rumoured to cost about $150 in Singapore (I bought an authentic pair for only $20)).

Conclusion:

When I review movies, my policy was to always give movies a constructive review where I talked about the good and bad of the movie and whether enjoyed it. I usually never talked down on movies since the crew behind such movies have worked hard to make them a reality. However, if the movie I'm reviewing is so bad it pisses me off into how incompentent and torturing the movie was, I will call it out. I never sugarcoat my review to make it sound good; for me, the honest truth matters more, especially if there is little to no effort put into the movie at all.

To say this was one of the most unnecessary animated movies of all time was putting it very lightly. This dared to exist in theatres across the world where it should have gone straight to DVD or Netflix in the first place.

A terribly written story that felt broken, cringe-worthy 'comedy', a virtually non-existent script, low-grade animation, a cast of unbearable and forgettable characters and one of the worst sounding soundtracks of all time. It's everything you expect from an animated movie trainwreck that was completely unnecessary and irredeemable.

While this movie is 100% unsafe for regular consumption and most regular folk should stay away, I highly recommend it to those brave enough to venture into the depths of terrible animation, or for a drunk screening because for sure, the cold brew hits.

However, as crazy as I would suggest, if given a choice, I would rather watch this again than Netflix's The I-Land, because I would rather laugh at this movie's incompetence than raging at the many stupid decisions everyone who worked on The I-Land made. So there, it's not the worst thing that came out in 2019, which is the only good thing from the movie.

Gosh, ranting about this nasty delivery makes me tired... Time to return to the Tumblr retirement home... 

[sempiternalsandpitturtle]

8 influencer marketing statistics that will guide your strategy in 2019 and beyond

Remember Beanie Babies?

These stuffed toys inspired perhaps the quintessential collector fad of the 1990s, giving Gen-X and millennial consumers their own little taste of Tulip Mania. All the enormous hype and eye-popping price tags got a big boost from a then-innovative source: one of the first real blogs, maintained by parent company Ty, on which different Beanie Babies would “post” their ghostwritten updates to an online diary.

The Ty blog entries showcased the early potential of influencer marketing, the practice of building brand awareness, cultivating an audience and shaping purchase decisions via the power of well-known and persuasive personalities. In that case, it entailed personas modeled on highly sought-after toys, meant to drive word-of-mouth about their appeal in lieu of conventional ad buys. Today, “influencer marketing” as a term is nearly synonymous with the recommendations of peers and online content creators, as well as celebrity endorsements.

You wouldn’t be mistaken to think that influencer marketing is as much about the messenger and their chosen medium – whether that’s a blog or, increasingly, a social media platform – as it is about the message in question. So does it actually work? We’ve put together these influencer marketing statistics to help answer this question and guide you in incorporating it into your marketing initiatives.

1. 70 percent of YouTube viewers trust YouTube creators more than other celebrities

Everything from an in-depth product review to a quick how-to video has a natural home on YouTube, making the platform an especially versatile channel through which influencer marketers can reach and affect their audiences. And those audiences are huge.

The above number, taken from a Google-sponsored study, indicates that literally 1 billion+ plus individuals place YouTube stars among the foremost trendsetters and tastemakers. Popular channels like those of fashion reviewer Grace Helbig and podcaster Joe Rogan have millions of subscribers apiece.

More importantly, their followers are highly engaged and likely to act on what they hear. Six in 10 YouTubers would give more weight to a content creator’s advice on what to buy than they would a traditional celebrity endorsement.

A successful influencer marketing campaign on YouTube could take the form of a hands-on demo, careful product placement or daily vlogging. There are so many ways to build and monetise an audience on YouTube for marketing efforts within your particular niche, whether that’s beauty product recommendations or power tool guides

2. Instagram topped 1 billion active users in 2018 – and most of them are millennials and Gen-Z

If we had to point out where influencer marketing crossed the Rubicon from “oh this is kind of a neat idea” to “wow there is serious power here”, it would be Instagram’s launch in 2010. Instagram took influencer marketing mobile, dramatically expanding the potential audience.

Its distinctive aesthetics and user demographics, which skew younger than the general population, also made it an ideal platform for posting the aspirational content so conducive to building brand awareness and loyalty. You don’t have to take our word for it, though – 87 percent of influencers cited Instagram as their favorite platform in 2018.

Between 2016 and 2017, the number of Instagram posts bearing the FTC-required #ad or #sponsored hashtags for sponsored content surged to 1.5 million. These updates generated over 1 billion likes between them that year. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story, as influencer marketing efforts on Instagram are often subtle and organic.

Almost two-thirds of the top-performing Instagram posts feature products and find their audiences through carefully selected hashtags, filters and additional details such as geotags and video captions (these are very important, and a lot of people don’t even know they exist). The Instagram users who engage with influencer posts are relatively young millennial consumers; over 60 percent of them under 35. That puts them squarely in the lucrative 18-34 segment that many marketers target.

Bottom line: Almost any modern influencer marketing campaign will be #blessed to have a strong presence on Instagram. As much as three-quarters of purchasing decisions by Instagram users are influenced by what they see on the platform.

3. Nine in ten Pinterest users use their pins to plan purchase decisions

Other than Instagram, no platform is so closely associated with influencer marketing as Pinterest, the image-centric social network that launched in 2010. Pinterest’s pinboard-inspired design lets users assemble collections of pictures, GIFs, videos and other items, many of which serve as blueprints for future purchases.

If services like Pocket and Instapaper offer the web’s version of a “Read It Later” button, Pinterest is a close as it gets to a “Buy It Later (Probably)” button. Ninety percent of Pinterest users saying they use it to make purchasing decisions and 60 percent buy something from a brand after seeing a promoted pin.

To influencer marketers, Pinterest offers a great balance of branded content opportunities and organic reach. To Pinners, the site is a much more trusted source of product recommendations and exposure than search engines, other social media or even friends and family.

Pinterest offers greater flexibility than the other major influencer marketing platforms. A Pinterest campaign might entail curating a special board that mixes products from top brands, using promoted pins or participating in the official Pin Collective program, which pairs businesses with content creators who are experts in producing beautiful, high-engagement pins.

The long half-life of Pinterest pins also allows for highly protracted marketing efforts. The typical pin takes 3.5 months to generate half of its engagement, compared to 90 minutes for a Facebook update and only 24 minutes for a tweet.

4. Twitch averaged more than 3 million unique monthly broadcasters in 2018

A Netflix executive once identified the hit game “Fortnite” as a bigger competitor than Hulu or HBO. That’s because on top of actual playing time, users collectively watch billions of minutes of lengthy live playthroughs of “Fornite” and other games, along with non-gaming content. Influencer marketers are capitalising on the platform’s notably high levels of engagement.

Users who spend only a few seconds engaging with marketing content on Instagram or Facebook might spend minutes with it on Twitch, since they are giving the live video their full attention. There are plenty of effective ways to reach an audience on Twitch via an influencer campaign, including:

Unboxing videos.

Product shout-outs.

Sponsored live streams.

Giveaway contests.

While it’s not as well-known an influencer marketing platform as Instagram, Pinterest or YouTube, Twitch is an up-and-comer with undeniable potential. Partnering with an influential content creator on a live stream is a relatively low-cost way for a brand to incorporate video into its marketing efforts and increase its chances of sustained engagement.

Don’t mistake Twitch for a gaming-only platform, although that does remain its most prominent vertical. The platform has dedicated categories for hobbies and crafts, food and drink, art, science and technology, special events and more. With more than 9 million channels up and running, there’s endless variety across Twitch and plenty of room for you to reach the right audience.

5. 43 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook

No discussion of today’s social media-powered influencer marketing would be complete without a few words about the Social Network itself and its more than 2 billion members. Facebook’s sheer size makes it an important forum for influencers, despite it lacking the curatorial design of Pinterest, the cultivated aesthetic of Instagram or the video-only format of YouTube and Twitch.

The stat above shows just how wide Facebook’s reach is across digital life. It’s a local and national news site as much as it is a place to like vacation photos or reply to questions in someone’s status update. The massive number of eyeballs focused on Facebook means that reaching even a small sliver of its active users can generate considerable return on investment (ROI). Marketers as a whole see Facebook as the best social network for ROI on ad spend. What about influencer marketers in particular?

Facebook has gradually made it easier for influencers to team up with organisations looking to reach certain audiences. Dedicated tools such as the Brand Collabs Manager simplify the process by which brands can find, contact and collaborate with content creators whose audiences overlap with their own.

Even without using these specialised services, influencers can get plenty of mileage from Facebook by reposting and sharing assets originally posted elsewhere, such as a video or infographic. Influencer content on Facebook has a higher click-through rate than ads, although its cost per click is also higher.

6. 40 percent of Twitter users have made a purchase in response to an influencer’s tweet

Twitter has likened influencer marketing to the digital equivalent of a Wheaties box. That cereal brand became notable for the athlete portraits that appeared on many of its boxes and indicated the star’s endorsement. The fast-paced, conversational nature of Twitter makes it a powerful engine for generating word-of-mouth via comparably high-profile endorsements, albeit ones that can attract thousands of likes and retweets within a matter of minutes.

Twitter users who see tweets from brands experience a 2.7-fold jump in purchase intent. Add influencer tweets to the mix, though, and the boost nearly doubles, to a 5.2x increase. In fact, Twitter’s researchers discovered only a narrow gap between the share of users who sought out recommendations from influencers (49 percent) and those who did the same from friends and family (56 percent).

On Twitter, as on the other platforms we’ve looked at, the best approach to building brand awareness and converting users is usually to combine influencer and branded content. That way, you can reach an audience at different parts of the sales funnel while presenting them with varied content, from video testimonials to tweets optimised and tagged to gain traffic from current events and holidays,

7. Word-of-mouth generates twice as many sales as direct advertising

We’ve talked a lot about specific social networks and how they let influencers connect with their audiences. YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter are undoubtedly powerful tools, but what does success look like when using them? Start with high engagement, which leads to increased word-of-mouth activity.

An effective YouTube explainer video or a strategically placed pin can generate the consumer-to-consumer recommendations that often provide much greater ROI than simply buying an ad. According to McKinsey, recommendations of the iPhone during its first 2 years of availability in Germany drove six times as many sales of the devices as Apple’s own paid advertising.

Very little if anything in the marketing world compares to a direct recommendation from a trusted source. Whereas display ads often lose out to ad blockers and video spots are either ignored or skipped, word-of-mouth suggestions reliably hit home. Friends and family are high on the list, and so are content creators with large and attentive audiences, as Twitter found in its research on how the platform shaped buying decisions.

8. Brands average a $6.50 return for every $1 of influencer marketing spend

At the end of the day, influencer marketing efforts must do more than build an audience. They must also show tangible ROI and prove that they’re worth investing in, even at the expense of possibly bypassing more traditional routes such as direct advertising.

Evaluating an influencer marketing campaign is complex, with many possible KPIs to look at, including:

Brand mentions.

Comments, likes and shares.

Overall audience reach.

Form completions and other conversions.

Changes in sales.

Inevitably, results from influencer marketing vary widely by company and platform. They’re generally positive, however – 70 percent of respondents to an Influencer Marketing Hub survey reported an ROI of $2 or more and the average ROI was $6.50 per dollar. Some companies saw as much as a 20-to-1 return!

In 2019 and beyond, influencer marketing is a critical area to focus on, alongside other similarly proven practices like SEO and email marketing. While the days of using a humble online diary to generate a huge bubble in the prices of stuffed toys – and an ensuing cultural phenomenon – are long gone, you have a more sustainable opportunity in front of you: The chance to cultivate audience trust and admiration, all at the massive scale of the web.

from http://bit.ly/2KKZzXI