Cloverfield Update Time
Back in July I wrote about the greatest movie marketing ever. This was JJ Abrams new movie that was untitled at the time, but soon after that it became “Cloverfield” I wrote about how they were planning on doing all kinds of secret viral marketing for the movie. Well they did, and it’s some kick ass stuff. Since we are now two weeks away from the premier I will give an overview of most of the viral components to this movie.
Many of the characters of the movie seem to have myspace pages. They have had them for months and they are all run like normal people would run their myspace pages. It’s pretty cool; they are all different, there doesn’t seem to be any patterns to the layouts of their pages. Most of them blog and they blog about normal stuff that people would talk about. For example "Hawk" talks about fantasy football (and he writes about real events that happened this year) and Lil writes about thing she sees in the subway.
The key myspace page appears to be Rob Hawkins I think he is the main character in the movie. He also seems to be the person who is having the going away party in the trailer. His latest blog entry that he wrote last Friday (Jan 4th) is about getting a job offer in Japan to be the “V.P.of Marketing and Promotions for SLUSHO! Brand ‘happy drink’”.
There are two things in that blog entry that seem very important. One is Slusho, Slusho has been known to be linked to the movie since I first wrote about it (I will explain more later). The other thing is he answers a question from one of the comments (the question comes from another one of the characters) by saying he will be leaving in “a few weeks, around the middle of the month”. Which means everything seems to be happening in real time. They have developed this whole world with events happening all the time and it’s all happening in real time.
Slusho and Tagruato are the most important parts of this viral campaign. All the people who are really into this movie and the marketing surrounding it have been digging into everything they could find since last July. Once Slusho was discovered to be connected to the movie it was later discovered that Slusho is just a portion of a much larger corporation named Tagruato. Tagruato is a corporation that “is a collective of top scientists, engineers, and businessmen committed to leading our investors and the whole of mankind into the future.” (taken from their website)
Among other things Tagruato has a number of huge very deep sea drilling stations. Right around Christmas they released a statement saying there was an incident at one of their stations (a station called Chuai.) They didn’t say much about it, but this lead too much speculation across they web.
Then yesterday a bunch of huge clues were dropped. There were a number of foreign language videos that showed up yesterday. They are all from newscasts around the world and they all have to do with the Chuai Station disaster. Here are the videos: German, Italian, Japanise, Spanish and French (I would guess an English one will be out in the next day or two, if not today.) They all have slightly different footage, the German on has the best IMO, I think you can also hear the monster roar in that one. Since things seem to be happening in real time, I would expect more things to happen in the next two weeks leading up to the movie premier (and the attack on NYC)
*EDITED 1/7/08 9:00 AM* English version just appeared on YouTube within the last hour.
Pretty cool stuff.
There is much more to the marketing campaign, but these seem to be the most important aspects from what I could gather.
Many of the characters of the movie seem to have myspace pages. They have had them for months and they are all run like normal people would run their myspace pages. It’s pretty cool; they are all different, there doesn’t seem to be any patterns to the layouts of their pages. Most of them blog and they blog about normal stuff that people would talk about. For example "Hawk" talks about fantasy football (and he writes about real events that happened this year) and Lil writes about thing she sees in the subway.
The key myspace page appears to be Rob Hawkins I think he is the main character in the movie. He also seems to be the person who is having the going away party in the trailer. His latest blog entry that he wrote last Friday (Jan 4th) is about getting a job offer in Japan to be the “V.P.of Marketing and Promotions for SLUSHO! Brand ‘happy drink’”.
There are two things in that blog entry that seem very important. One is Slusho, Slusho has been known to be linked to the movie since I first wrote about it (I will explain more later). The other thing is he answers a question from one of the comments (the question comes from another one of the characters) by saying he will be leaving in “a few weeks, around the middle of the month”. Which means everything seems to be happening in real time. They have developed this whole world with events happening all the time and it’s all happening in real time.
Slusho and Tagruato are the most important parts of this viral campaign. All the people who are really into this movie and the marketing surrounding it have been digging into everything they could find since last July. Once Slusho was discovered to be connected to the movie it was later discovered that Slusho is just a portion of a much larger corporation named Tagruato. Tagruato is a corporation that “is a collective of top scientists, engineers, and businessmen committed to leading our investors and the whole of mankind into the future.” (taken from their website)
Among other things Tagruato has a number of huge very deep sea drilling stations. Right around Christmas they released a statement saying there was an incident at one of their stations (a station called Chuai.) They didn’t say much about it, but this lead too much speculation across they web.
Then yesterday a bunch of huge clues were dropped. There were a number of foreign language videos that showed up yesterday. They are all from newscasts around the world and they all have to do with the Chuai Station disaster. Here are the videos: German, Italian, Japanise, Spanish and French (I would guess an English one will be out in the next day or two, if not today.) They all have slightly different footage, the German on has the best IMO, I think you can also hear the monster roar in that one. Since things seem to be happening in real time, I would expect more things to happen in the next two weeks leading up to the movie premier (and the attack on NYC)
*EDITED 1/7/08 9:00 AM* English version just appeared on YouTube within the last hour.
Pretty cool stuff.
There is much more to the marketing campaign, but these seem to be the most important aspects from what I could gather.