Prior to the Cloverfield Project, my only experience with an online ARG was a casual fling with the Cloudmakers game for the movie A.I. (which was focused on a storyline set in the AI universe but which did not directly connect to a majority of the events in the film).
Given my lack of experience, I was completely unprepared for (and find myself increasingly annoyed by) the onslaught of posts by dozens of newcomers to the game breathlessly and urgently proclaiming the discovery of the “new” 1-18-08 trailer or the the “new” 1-18-08 website. In every case, the posts in question refer to the Cloverfield trailer being featured at iTunes or the Slusho.jp website.
Of course the newbies assume that because something is new to them, it’s new to everyone.
Then we have those folks who add two and two together and get the sum of eleventy-three; they argue in tortured detail from their parents’ basements that the movie is going to be about Pokemon, or Digimon, or the Rampage video game.
As mentioned before, such arguments make Baby Jesus cry — between bouts of pointing and laughing.
As a result of these experiences, I have come to realize that the biggest enemy of such a marketing campaign is time. Why the folks at Paramount thought it would be a good idea to launch a viral marketing campaign for a movie due to hit the nation’s silver screens 6 months and 15 days from now is beyond me. I can’t conceive of how enough content could be generated and piece-mealed out over that stretch of time in such a way as to maintain, let alone grow, interest in that movie.
And all that time means that people who are bored and malicious, or those who have over-active imaginations, have more opportunities to muddy the water and increases the likelihood that the rest of are going to decide to stop swimming.
Hello? “Snakes On a Plane”, anyone? And that did it with just the TITLE…
Well, OK… at least then we HAD a title…
I didn’t even know that it HAD a viral marketing campaign; your comment prompted me to go to Wikipedia and find the entry on the movie — which didn’t do well, despite the internet buzz. Same thing happened to AI. Huge VMC, not-so-huge box ofice.
Right there with you Nighthawk on the Snakes movie. I remember seeing previews/blogs about it months upon months before the movie was even released. Hell, it was so early that I had the time to forget about the movie then remember it when the release date was coming up!
I’m going to be right there with you on being annoyed with a lot of the information that’s being “found” and blogged about. It’s just kind of annoying that people have Google and other resources to find out about it before they blog about it, but they don’t.
I just recently pissed someone off when I put up a parody trailer that featured a clip from GB, the video you posted up. Apparently having a joke once in awhile is, god forbid, against teh rulez of teh internets.
The internet is serious business!
Let that be a lesson to you Jordan: Having fun on the Internet makes Baby Jesus cry.