The Marketleap Report
Vol. 1 - Issue #5 - April 16, 2001

Artificial Intelligence - Viral Marketing and the Web
By Keith Boswell

Murder, threats, intrigue, sentient robots and a future very close to our own. If you expect a description of the latest hit science fiction book to follow, sorry to disappoint. Instead, these are all themes of the online "marketing" for the upcoming summer movie "AI".

Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a concept by Stanley Kubrick, the movie's production has been swaddled in Fort Knox-style secrecy. The movie has been described by some as a retelling of Pinocchio using robots instead of the puppet boy.

Then last week, a new trailer for the film was released on the web. Along with that release came rumors that you could perform a Google.com search for someone named Jeanine Salla and enter an online world unlike anything ever associated with film marketing.

Click on the first link it returns, and begin the hunt. The web sites take you into a world more similar to Blade Runner than the classic children's tale.

The Blair Witch Project first proved the web's value for marketing a movie. Bound by a small marketing budget, the web proved to be the one outlet where the money spent paid off in spades. Until that film came along, most movies were marketed on the web through Flash games, on-set photos and diaries, and free wallpaper screens.

The creators of the Blair Witch Project told an extensive back-story that is not part of the theatrical release. The buzz around that story lead to huge box office receipts for a movie many claimed they could have made themselves. Some were so convinced by the detail, they believed the move was real.

Since then, movies have attempted to pull users more into the film's world. But nothing compares with the "AI" world online. Once you search at Google.com, you are lead through an increasingly complex story that may or may not be part of the actual movie.

You learn more about the culture the movie is set in than you do the events in the movie. A-list actors Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law both star in the movie, but they are nowhere to be found in any of the related web sites.

Spielbergís 'AI' has Web heads spinning

Instead, a patient and sleuthy browser could spend hours digging deeper into this strangely familiar world. The stage is set for a world where humans and sentient robots co-exist.

Robosuicides are on the rise, as are movements for and against robot rights. At times you are threatened, at other times rewarded, but you increasingly feel as if you are on the edge of a very deep and complex world.

You'll receive threatening e-mails that make vague references to actions you have read about. You can figure out ways to break into private web accounts to see what's going on behind the scenes. Some of the web sites even look as if they have been hacked, allowing you to read messages hidden in the source code of the HTML.

It's engrossing in the same way a great book envelopes your imagination. At first, my mind didn't quite turn to the whole concept. But as I went further and uncovered more and more details, it almost became an obsession. The story is so well constructed, it left me gasping.

Set in the 22nd century, you get a taste of everything. Architecture and design, magazines, corporations, family sites, political movements, repair shops, robot retrieval shops, and universities are all browsable. The story's depth leaves your mind wondering how this could all be for just one movie.

Ain't It Cool News has created quite a stir in Hollywood by allowing movie fans to gather and share information as they uncover it. It has also become a voicing ground for reviews from everyday moviegoers.

By Sunday, April 15, the message boards at http://www.aintitcool.com/ concerning the online world of "AI" were teeming with activity. Hundreds of posts discussed attempts to retrieve information, new bits of knowledge that had been learned and general remarks about the quality of the story and what it meant to the movie.

Electronic Arts is about to release a new game called Majestic that plays along these same lines. You give it your phone number, fax number and e-mail address, and the game begins creeping into your everyday life.

Creepy faxes start arriving along with strange phone calls and cryptic mail. Players are lead deeper and deeper into a world of conspiracy, twisted plotlines and real-world involvement.

The beauty here is the power to draw you in. This is marketing at the next level. Great time and effort were spent to be one step ahead of the audience. It's brilliant.

That intelligence is what it will take to win mind share in the ever-smarter consumer age. No longer content to play a cheap Flash game where we shoot the alien marauder or download a picture of our favorite star resting by their trailer, we now expect marketers to push our primal buttons.

Marketers able to create the rubberneck effect - causing everyone to slow down and take a look - will succeed because they challenge the audience. As creative minds take to the possibility of telling stories in a mixture of media, stronger relationships will be formed with the audience.

Radio, television, movies and information sharing will combine to create a new form of storytelling - experiential stories that grab the consciousness with ferocity. Good stories are appreciated around the world. The better you can tell and relate them, the more powerful they become.