The Cloverfield monster is coming to get you!
A new big budget CGI laden blockbuster has just had its opening few days in America, nothing particularly surprising in that. What separates Cloverfield from the usual Hollywood release was the way in which eMarketing played such a central role in the pre-release promotion of the film.
However, in some quarters the film has been greeted rather coolly, with cries that it’s ‘just another monster movie’ or that it’s just a rather weak ‘re-imagining’ of all those Japanese Godzilla movies made 25 years ago. Whilst movies, especially ones about a big CGI green monster rampaging through New York, will always get negative reviews from certain quarters, has the hype that the film’s Emarketing strategy created actually increased the sense of disappointment?
When the Michael Bay film ‘Transformers’ opened last summer a short two minute trailer was shown before the film. The trailer looked as if it was shot on a consumer digital camcorder and showed very little except some motion-sickness inducing scenes of a house party, interrupted by a power cut and large explosion somewhere in the distance. The trailer ended in a very simple black screen that displayed a web address 01.18.08.com
The power of online rumour
This one simple trailer sparked an international wave of rumour and speculation that spread across the web within hours, involving many hundreds of thousands of people that had not even seen the trailer. That’s the power of the Internet folks! The web address shown on the trailer took visitors to a micro-site that had next to nothing on it, except some still images from the trailer. This website was added to randomly and without warning with new images and cryptic messages that appeared to be coming from characters in the film.
The campaign was added to with an extremely random website in Japanese that appeared to promote a soft drink called slusho, and facebook pages were created for some of the film’s characters. That was it, two quite simple websites and a few facebook pages.
What makes this campaign stand out is what people then did with what the official marketing campaign had started.
Eager participants
The internet is a breeding ground for rumours, whispers and conspiracies and there is nothing the online-community enjoys more than a treasure hunt. Within hours of the trailer been shown an international network of forums, bloggers and film-geeks were whipping themselves into a state of near frenzy – all for of a film that was not been released for another six months.
In a very simple, yet ingenious way the official marketing campaign had created a vast unpaid army of sales people promoting their film across the world. Hundreds of new websites were created by ‘fans’ of a film they had not seen and knew nothing about. Rumours went back and forth across the Internet about every small detail, from plot to what the monster might be.
Losing control
But all this online activity has a downside. The whole strategy behind the official campaign was to loose control. They created something and just let it loose online – the defining characteristic of viral marketing. Did this create unrealistic hype? Rumour, was piled onto of rumour. Fans of comic books and science fiction all had their own perspective and created their own expectations about what the yet untitled film was all about.
The reality
Now that the film has finally being realised the inevitable has happened, for many the film does not live up to the hype and to some extent an online backlash has begun. But does this really matter; the true success of the campaign will be bums on seats in the cinema.
