Lynda Obst has a piece in The Atlantic about how summer blockbusters get marketed. The article is great because she conveys with wonder how people like Warner Brothers' Sue Kroll and Sony's Jeff Blake manage to get people interested in movies.

"If they like it, they will keep coming. But thinking they will like it is the job of the marketing department, and if a movie does not have a "unaided awareness"—i.e., it is an original idea, or not a sequel or based on a big or well known comic—it is increasingly dependent on the genius or lack thereof at each studio to invent a campaign that sells that idea to the world. If it doesn't click, the movie dies a quick death."

The pitch matters just as much as the product. In publishing, it is laboring over title, cover design and jacket copy just as much as the prose or the arguments in the book itself.