What do a Japanese juice drink, screaming civilians, and half-eaten beached whales have in common?
All three were part of the massive online advertising campaign for the largest grossing January film release ever: Cloverfield. Apart from a few short commercials, the advertising for Cloverfield was not so much through television adverts, but through the hippest new word-of-mouth technique: viral marketing.
I still remember sitting through the previews before Transformers only to see the short trailer for a mysterious film by J. J. Abrams. Nothing really about the movie was announced, besides that something was going down, and apparently it was going down on Jan. 18. Quickly, I rushed to my laptop to learn more about this movie, and found the viral marketing and alternate reality game had already begun.
No, an alternate reality game (ARG) is not my friends and I dressing up like medieval knights, launching Nerf crossbows at a seven-foot Lego dragon erected in my parent's backyard, it's the slickest way for movie studios to get people talking on the "inter-Web."
From the debut of the trailer, Web sites such as 1-18-08.com and slusho.jp began releasing clues about what the future of Manhattan would be...and it didn't look good.
However, before the Big Apple was about to be trashed, viral marketing and ARG's had been floating around as promotional tours for years as clever ways to get the usually-fickle Internet community interested.
Nine Inch Nails, in promotion for their epic concept record Year Zero, started a viral marketing campaign that had people scouring bathrooms at concert venues for flash drives with new tracks and hints as to what was going on in Trent Reznor's mind.
Heck, even Spielberg pulled off one of the grandest spectacles in viral marketing for the film A.I, as Web sleuths took time away from AIM and the Something Awful forums to search for the murder victim heard in an eerie voicemail.
Unfortunately, it was the bickering between the message board users that proved to be more entertaining than the movie - the jury is still out on who's more robotic, Haley Joel Osment, real actor or T-101, fictitious cyborg. The Internet ARG remains one of the best advertising campaigns ever fashioned.
More recently, comic book fans and people who just like to dress up as maniacal clowns were treated well at this year's Comic-Con, when the ARG for the awaited Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, kicked into full effect. From what started as a Web site with coordinates on it, the Comic-Con attendants soon found themselves in a race against time where they not only had to use their instincts, but also the directions given by the Web site to solve the case for a huge reward: the first released photos of Heath Ledger as The Joker.
For someone like me who has trouble focusing while writing anything (even this column can't stop me from reading rottentomatoes.com, but don't stop reading) (?parenthetical statement?), following ARGs is one of the best ways to procrastinate that English 310 paper.
Being a part of one is a different story. You have to be "inter-Web" savvy alongside having an ImageShack account with enough GIF's to "pwn" any person who holds an opinion different from yours.
Personally, I don't have the patience and I'm far from an Internet detective, making my role in such marketing campaigns unattached. But following ARGs is just as fun, and in some cases, just as rewarding.
Take Cloverfield, for example. Much of the negative attention was from people who didn't understand the concept of the film. Many of the questions about the monster intentionally left in the teaser were answered before the film's release through YouTube videos and various movie Web sites.
Why stop with movies? How about an alternate reality game based on real life? Maybe a Web site can pop up brandishing a paternity test that reveals it wasn't Joel Madden who fathered Nicole Richie's child. With enough popularity, pay phones can ring in with clues about who the potential father could be. Obviously, the only pay-off for the players would be to find out that the Cloverfield monster was in fact the baby's daddy.
Sorry Professor Bono, while William Shakespeare may have created the greatest love stories of our time, I'd rather spend my time figuring out why Lionel's grandson is terrorizing Manhattan.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
