Interesting article.

-----Original Message-----
From: sportspr@... [mailto:sportspr@...]
Sent: 13 November 2001 13:39
To: cloudmakers@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [cloudmakers] A.I. online marketing campaign wins award


Adweek's Picks: Best Viral Marketing Campaign = 'A.I.' Promotion
If The Blair Witch Project was the shot heard around the interactive
world, then A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, is D-Day in the marketing
war on the Internet. Where the online campaign for The Blair Witch
Project merely created a fixed back-story, A.I. upped the ante with a
deeply complex and interactive game dispatching users into the world
of the film.

It was a covert and subtle promotion. Fine print on early movie
posters and film trailers revealed a mysterious credit for Jeanine
Salla, listed as "sentient machine therapist." Curious minds typed
Salla's name into a Google (news - external web site) search and were
rewarded with myriad Web sites casting them on a bizarre treasure
hunt.

"The campaign was a futuristic murder mystery, where the players were
thrust into an artificial world in the year 2122 through an
interconnected string of Web sites," explains Doug Horlick, vp of
marketing for the Chicago-based media firm Three Mountain Group.
Microsoft, which came up with the original editorial concept, hired
Three Mountain to bring the movie to life online.

Only 13 sites were live when the campaign launched in the middle of
March, months before the June 29 opening of the Warner Bros.
film. "We developed two to three new sites per week for the next
three months," notes Horlick. By the time A.I. was in wide
distribution there were 30 to 40 sites ranging from simple, static
pages to dynamic and graphically intensive ones. "It was supposed to
look like a virtual world from a very high level to a low level,"
says Horlick.

But this wasn't strictly an Internet campaign. What gave the game
legitimacy was its reach into the real world. "We used the Internet
because we think it's the best way for viral or word-of-mouth
communication, but marrying it with traditional advertising, marrying
it with video, marrying it with commercials that have hints,
billboards, what have you, was really the success factor," says
Horlick.

Participants found characters from the film e-mailing them. They even
received voicemail-pre-recorded phone calls-from robots directing
them to the next level of the game. "It was revolutionary," says
Keith Boswell, senior strategist for Market Leap, a San Francisco-
based Internet marketing firm. "By combining the elements of puzzle-
based games and really rich storytelling, they were able to capture
peoples' imaginations in a way that no one else has even attempted."

Sarah Fay, president of Boston-based media firm Carat Interactive,
sees the success of A.I. in its ability to make "the customer the
medium." Viral campaigns are "the new PR," adds Fay. "If you tweak
the message in just the right way and you have something that's
quality as a destination, you don't have to spend millions and
millions of media dollars. It can take on a life of its own."

Three Mountain Group would not disclose the price tag for its
creative work, but Horlick says, "the outside cost to the interactive
initiative is not as large as you might think." He did share some
impressive numbers for the campaign: 1 million unique users, more
than 3 million sessions, with 28 percent of visitors remaining online
for more than a half-hour.

What kept users involved was the intricacy of the game. Clues were
based on everything from general knowledge to riddles embedded in the
very source code of a particular site. "You had to create a community
in order to deal with the magnitude of the challenges that the game
creators were throwing at you," Boswell says, underscoring the viral
foundation of the campaign.

"The community element of it can't be understated," says Mark
Mooradian, vp and senior analyst for New York-based Jupiter Media
Metrix. "It's very difficult to have a static piece of information on
a site really convey excitement, because ultimately it is brochure-
ware. However, when you have another human who's excited at the
prospect of solving a mystery, excited at the prospect of delving
deeper into something about robots, all of a sudden you're engaged."

What remains to be seen is how to chart the success of the viral
marketing of films, where most of the marketing budget is dedicated
to traditional venues. "I think studios are starting to get a handle
on intellectualizing the process of marketing," Mooradian
remarks. "The next thing is actually measuring that kind of reach."




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