Ambient Advertising

Guerrilla, Ambient & Viral Movie Marketing Pt 2: 2001 – 2006

Part 1 can be read here.

In Part 1 I looked at the marketing campaign behind The Blair Witch Project that helped in making the film one of the most profitable ever made. Part 2 covers films released2001 to 2006, it’s not definitive so if you have any suggestions on entries I have missed please feel free to leave them below. The ratings are based solely on my opinion of the viral, guerrilla, ambient techniques used by films and are totally subjective.

Artificial Intelligence (2001)

This 2001 Speilberg film was the first to successfully devise an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). It was called ‘The Beast’ and consisted of a labyrinth style maze of websites and online clues that was set 50 years after the events in the film. Users found out about the games in one of three ways; through trailers and posters that credited Jeanine Salla as ‘Sentient Machine Therapist’, or through an encoded telephone number in promotional text which gave callers instructions that eventually lead to an email stating that “Jeanine is the key” and that “you’ve seen her name before.” A more obvious entry point was through promotional material sent to tech and entertainment websites that stated “Evan Chan was murdered. Jeanine is the key.” The name Jeanine Salla when entered in Google returned pages of fictional websites that developed the back story, including answering machine messages, 30 fictional websites, new characters and even live telephone conversations with in game characters. All of which brough players on a three month investigation of Evan Chan’s death. Source, Source, The Beast Wiki

Rating: A solid 7/10, it successfully pulled off an elaborate maze of clues for players to follow over several months while expanding on the films reality. The interactivity also extended offline to phone messages and real conversations that would pull in players further and further. Clever, engaging and certainly unique for its time.

28 Days Later (2002)

28 Days Later was shot for just under $10 million and returned over $82 million world wide, putting it ahead of that summer’s blockbusters Terminator 3 and Charlies Angels. While the film used TV spots on male skewed shows, their out of home campaign had flyposters that included attention grabbing dialogue from the film such as ‘the end is extremely f**king nigh’, a graphic novel style prologue that ran on escalator panels on the London underground, a fake survivalist website and flyers with the biohazard symbol (the films logo) were distributed at summer music festivals. In Dublin this was carried over into street graffiti and the logo was also projected onto the Dail (our Parliament). While the US campaign was more focused online to drive interest in the fans (read it here), Searchlight also took the unusual strategy of releasing an alternative ending to the film while it was still in the cinemas in order to please fans disappointed by the upbeat original ending.

Rating… I have to admit not remembering any of the Irish marketing for this film. Reading back over it, there are some nice touches such as the flyposters that would grab attention and hitting the target audience at music festivals. The most effective part of the campaign, was the TV spots that featured audience reviews, I remember those making me want to see the film. 5/10. Source, Source.

Godsend (2004)

Fake websites to promote a film were certainly nothing new by the time Godsend rolled around, and the use of fake companies had already been employed by other films such as Resident Evil and I, Robot. Part of the marketing for this quickly forgotten film featured ads for a fictional company called ‘The Godsend Institute’ in major US newspapers. What did the institute offer? To clone your child. Not only did they receive calls enquiring about the service but also calls to have the fake ad’s stopped.

Rating… Bizarre, but it also generated free publicity for the film. It probably says more about the people who enquired about getting their children cloned. 5/10 Source

Superman Returns (2006)

Most of the Superman Returns marketing was fairly run of the mill, trailers, teasers, an online behind the scenes video diary and prior to DVD launch an advergame (link to more info, although the game seems to be offline ). But the one piece of guerrilla marketing for the film was this, from Antwerp – A2 size hardback posters on lampposts that give the illusion the post has been knotted into the Superman logo.

Rating… Besides the Antwerp guerrilla example the rest of the marketing is fairly average. Even that example isn’t classic Guerrilla Marketing. So, unfortunately, for this effort I’m going to have to rate it just as highly as I rated the film 2/10.

Snakes On A Plane (2006)

When War Of The Worlds scribe Josh Friedman passed on the rewrite of the script to SOAP he happened to mention it on his blog. The films bombastic name struck a cord with readers who set about creating songs, comics, posters, fake trailers for the as yet un-finshed film. New Line openly encouraged the online input from fans in return for links on the official site and free artwork. Bloggers input extended as far as making the film more violent, dialogue changes and re-shoots.

New Line also ran a competition for music artists to submit songs to be considered for the soundtrack. In the run up to the films release New Line ran ‘The #1 Fan King Cobra Sweepstakes’ where contestants were rewarded for adding SOAP content such as links, videos and messages to other websites to gather votes. To put the icing on the cake, there was the personalised telephone message from Samuel L Jackson that would mention the listeners name, job and interests while talking up the film.

Rating… A very impressive 7/10. This is pure grassroots marketing getting those with skills (in art, film, music, design) and those who just want to be part of it (through the #1 fan) involved in the promotion of the film. The personal call is a nice touch and something similar to the personalised news report which was used more recently for Dexter. Source, Source.

In Part 3 I’ll be looking at what a special year 2007 was in movie marketing.

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Related posts:

1. Guerrilla, Ambient and Viral Movie Marketing (4): Cloverfield ‘V’ The Dark Knight
2. Guerrilla, Ambient & Viral Movie Marketing Pt 1: Blair Witch Project
3. Guerrilla, Ambient & Viral Movie Marketing Part 3: The Films of 2007
4. 59 More Guerrilla Marketing & Ambient Advert’s
5. Best Guerrilla & Ambient Marketing 2010

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