Following a chapter that discussed film prosumption with respect to the operation of the moving image, this chapter further explores the film industry-audience desegregation in a case of online marketing. I will examine the official blog of Miao Miao, the 2008 queer romance film directed by Cheng Hsiao-tse, and demonstrate the way in which online marketing has turned film production into an industry-audience collaboration. A preliminary sketch will first establish that marketers of Miao Miao implemented celebrity-audience intimacy as the film's primary marketing strategy.

In many ways, Miao Miao's blog campaign exemplified trends in post-2000 Taiwan film marketing. In 2008, right before the romantic comedy Cape No. 7 (Wei Te-Sheng) took the island by storm, Li Ya-mei, a senior Taiwan film marketer, wrote an article to outline the creative strategies Taiwan film practitioners had deployed in the crucial task of marketing. Apart from the tactics used to draw media attention and negotiate theatrical exhibition, Li has foregrounded pre-release question-and-answer (Q&A) tours and blog marketing as the essential new methods/gimmicks to reach out to potential and target audiences. These two methods have been widely adopted for practical reasons, Li contends, namely for their budget efficiency, which suits the operation of financially weak local film companies.

Frequently coupled with post-screening Q&A sessions or on-campus promotional events, pre-release Q&A tours are seen as a marketing strategy brought to full potential by the master art-house director Tsai Ming-liang. Having become an iconic auteur in the mid-1990s, Tsai suffered a huge box office failure in 1998 with The Hole. The apocalyptic drama-musical grossed merely NT$ 320,000 ($ 11,050) in Taipei despite garnering the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. To avoid another fiasco, Tsai first tried his hand at pre-release Q&A tours when promoting What Time Is It There? in 2002. Over the duration of the marketing campaign, Tsai and the film's main actors attended more than seventy Q&A events around the island. After the film was officially released, post-screening Q&A sessions were held on a daily basis throughout the screening period. In the end, What Time Is It There? grossed NT$ 3 million ($ 100,000), which indicated a breakthrough. Thereafter, Tsai replicated the tactic in marketing his later works The Skywalk Is Gone and Goodbye Dragon Inn, both released in 2003.