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Forget Jay Leno in the cat food aisle. 
Now the CBS marketing team has found an even more unusual way to flog its new fall series The Good Wife: by offering to bribe journalists just to consider mentioning the show. This would be pathetic if it weren’t so hilarious. (Note to Les Moonves who’s at the Cronkite memorial at Lincoln Center this morning: a $20 Amazon gift certificate isn’t gonna cut it with me. A new Benz, maybe.) Amy Morales, a “Community Activator” for the YouCast Corporation working for CBS, emailed me overnight thusly, after I deleted all the promotional bullshit:
Dear Deadline Hollywood Daily Editorial Team,
I know I just emailed you recently about CBS’s Three Rivers - I don’t mean to stalk your inbox – but I didn’t want you to miss out on The Good Wife either! … My goal in writing to you today is to see if you’d be interested in sharing this information with your readers. As a thank you for considering the story I would love to send you a $20 Amazon Gift Certificate…
I look forward to hearing from you!
Best,
Amy
So I looked for her Three Rivers email but found no bribe offer in that message. Poor Amy had to up the ante to flack The Good Wife to me. That can’t bode well for the show, can it? So Amy, since I didn’t just consider a story, I actually wrote one because of you, here’s what to do with that $20 Amazon gift certificate — stick it where the sun don’t shine, you asswipe.
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Wow. I work in book publishing so don’t swim in the stream of TV and film production much. But a publicist actually offering a gift card to consider plugging her show? I am truly shocked, it feels so illegitimate coming from a major network. They must really be desperate about the decline of network series.
3-2 odds that Amy just lost her job. If so, hard not to feel a little schadenfreude …
“here’s what to do with that $20 Amazon gift certificate”
Er, buy a Canterbury’s Law DVD box set?
What a ruthless, nervy, and ballsy thing to do ..I can’t believe what Amy did either!
The new site is growing on me and it’s hardly the “crapfest” I had originally thought it was. You are back in true form..Thanks@!
Nikki, honestly, did you not sleep well? Ass wipe? The poor girl’s just trying to do her job as sanctioned by CBS. Misguided yes but have some compassion woman.
Nikki, does this post qualify you for the gift certificate?
Maybe you can pre-order The Good Wife on DVD w/ it.
All it takes is a new Benz?!
If true, how does someone like an Amy Morales actually do what she did and think the backlash won’t occur? Amy take the certificates out of your darkness add it to about 1000 more and stand at the
intersection of Hollywood and Vine and pass them out. Now that is getting the word out.
Robert Goldstein
When will producers wake up and realize that their failed shows don’t fail? Rather, the networks’ ineffective promotion, the worst advertising in the history of American business, fails at not attracting high enough sampling levels and, if it did, more shows would be successful. They should sue for promotional malpractice and the irony is the people in charge of promotion at the networks know it doesn’t work!
Nikki,
Wow, just wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you be so mean in a posting. I don’t necessarily disagree with you and I do think it was tacky of them to do this, but wow. Though it should be noted that even bad press is good press, so you got The Good Wife some attention, which is probably their intention all along. They should have known you wouldn’t take a bribe…
$20?
Talk about playing penny-ante.
I say get an auction going, perhaps on e-bay. Make them shell out the top dollars.
Priceless
Genius. I’ll bet you get these all the time.
Please – post more. Am loving the new site, by the way!!!
Jesus Christ!
Probably cost Amy her job. Which I guess is a good thing?
as evidenced by your above comments, the world could use more of mr. archerd’s civility and less of your snarky vitriol.
an opinion can be presented in many ways. vulgar is only one option.
why do you continue to lower the bar in an industry already in the mud?
Nikki,
You missed an opportunity, instead of being rude to Amy you could have done the same story and offered the gift certificate to one of your readers (like the first to comment…).
Maybe a contest to see who could come up with the best obituary line for the new CBS show?
It would let us (your readers) participate a little bit.
Jeff (hoping for the first option
Why not ease up on Amy a bit — “asswipe” is pretty harsh. She’s just doing her job. And, those are hard to come by these days.
Hey man, that’s pretty unprofessional language, Nikki. You can get your point across without being a jerk.
Wow, Nikki.
I would’ve thought you were worth @ least a hundred…
But you have to admit, she did do her job.
Sooo her tactic completely worked.
Seriously, Nikki. It’s alright to take a swipe at this new kind of advertising and at CBS. But at Amy personally? I know you’re better than that.
Mean, mean, mean. She’s clearly a newbie, lots of enthusiasm, not hardened yet but she’ll learn soon enough. Make that right now: you just gave her her first lesson in Hollywood nastiness. Bravo.
You’re a blogger, not a journalist. A journalist would phone news organizations like the NY TIMES, the LA TIMES, USA TODAY, etc…and ask whether their reporters received the amazon gift card offer from Amy to write about The Good Wife. Most likely they have not. Simply slamming Amy her for doing her job because you don’t like an email she sent you is not journalism.
Amy and CBS are just carrying out a marketing campaign being utilized by many brands – reaching out to popular bloggers and offering them free products and gifts to give their products a positive mention. The growing popularity and effectiveness of this kind of marketing has been widely reported in the such places as the NY TIMES, the Wall Street Journal, etc…
Amy should have just checked her list more carefully before she sent out her email, and removed you from it.
Not only pathetic, but unethical – not that it doesn’t happen 24/7 in the real world. But hey, Nikki, you mentioned the two shows! You should get a free foot massage or somethin’…
Seriously… is it really necessary to publicly crucify Amy here?? Why the personal attack? CBS is the bad guy here, not Amy.
This blog is a great source of information — but why must it also be such a breeding ground for negativity? This business is ugly enough all on its own.
Agreed… but this isn’t a CBS employee! Obviously CBS farmed out the job to another company who farmed it out to someone else who hired a bunch of idiot teens to infiltrate those hip new things called “blogs”. Amy is probably 19… answered a ‘make money with your computer’ ad on craigslist and is trying to earn a couple of bucks in a tough economy. Asswipe? That’s a great way to describe this ‘writer’ who has admitted to being a whore… just for the Benz, not the giftcard. This ‘writer’ is suggesting that Les Moonves himself is personally responsible for this? That’s funny. Thinking that this two-paragraph, poorly-written “article” will have ANY influence over a network tv show… that’s sad.