One of the great success stories of viral marketing strategy was the marketing of the film “Cloverfield.” The first trailer to appear was filmed entirely using handheld cameras and was made to appear very amateurish. A name for the film wasn’t given, just the release date. This all added to the intrigue and helped spread the word about this mysterious new film. Not only that, but shortly afterwards, MySpace pages of the characters from the movie started to spring up.
The director of the film, Matt Reeves, had this to say about the tie-ins and fusion between film and internet culture:
It’s almost like tentacles that grow out of the film and lead, also, to the ideas in the film. And there’s this weird way where you can go see the movie and it’s one experience… But there’s also this other place where you can get engaged where there’s this other sort of aspect for all those people who are into that. [...] All the stories kind of bounce off one another and inform each other. But, at the end of the day, this movie stands on its own to be a movie. [...] The Internet sort of stories and connections and clues are, in a way, a prism and they’re another way of looking at the same thing. To us, it’s just another exciting aspect of the storytelling.
Other tie-ins included websites that served as puzzles and provided text-messaging codes to reveal further clues about the film. It all adds to the intrigue and the desire to know more. The film-style of “amateur shaky-camera” is an appeal to the audience’s familiarity with YouTube and all aspects of amateur filmmaking on Web2.0. It is no coincidence that JJ Abrams is the producer of LOST and Cloverfield, both productions that rely heavily on the internet for marketing the brand.
