Startrek.com’s illogical behavior
Paramount has begun what will eventually be a multimillion dollar marketing juggernaut behind the new Star Trek flick. But you wouldn’t know it from looking at StarTrek.com, the studio’s official site for the franchise. After a reorg late last year left the site basically staff-less, it’s essentially been in sleeper-ship mode, with a static home page promoting, not the new movie, which rolled out a teaser trailer last week, but an episode of the animated Trek series, circa 1973. The site’s news page was last updated December 18th (with a plea to “keep the conversation going on StarTrek.com boards”) and the page of the site designed to promote the new movie was last updated in early December (even worse, the landing page for the new, multi-city “Star Trek: The Tour” promotion is blank!). Of course, Paramount hasn’t given up completely on the web; a new “under construction” site at paramount.com/startrek has been launched to promote the movie, and a banner on the legacy site points to it. Still, the essential abandonment of the startrek.com domain at a time when the brand is due for a major revival deserves a raised eyebrow from Vulcans and experienced web marketers alike. StarTrek.com should be the go-to site for news and info about the new movie, and its current status as a ghost site that shows that, in the immortal words of Chancellor Gorkon, Paramount has a long way to go before it really gets the whole Internet thing.
