Hollywood Weaves a Marketing Web

While the independents may have the lead, there is a big release hitting the silver screen soon that has hit the Web marketing nail on the head. Steven Spielberg’s film, "A.I." (Artificial Intelligence), was originally a Stanley Kubrick project. Before shooting even began, the film already had the kind of hype marketers would sell their right arms for, as fans have been waiting for its creation since it was originally conceived by Kubrick many years ago.

The marketers at Warner Brothers have managed to tap into the interest of those fans-in-waiting by constructing an elaborate game of whodunit. A teaser trailer held a tiny clue for the particularly astute viewer: The name ‘’Jeanine Salla: Sentient Machine Therapist" appeared in the credits. When entered into a search engine, Salla’s name produces a link to a fictional Web site about "Bangalore World University."

Soon the mystery of who killed a man named Evan Chan is revealed as the impetus to find out more. The players find clues in Web sites by calling phone numbers or entering their fax numbers and e-mail addresses and receiving clues. FAQs have popped up on the Web to help people along, and a community of players who call themselves "cloudmakers" have gathered at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cloudmakers/ to exchange leads and theories.

The game is perfectly suited to the demographic to which the movie appeals — a perfect marriage of form and function that originated in a bit of video streamed on the Web.

Although most studios have not gone to such lengths to create a labyrinth of fictional Web sites, many are catching on to the fact that they have a lot more assets than just trailers to create marketing buzz for their films online. Bulycz comments that "a lot of the content that wouldn’t have a venue in traditional media ends up having a relatively inexpensive outlet on the Web, and it adds to the richness of the Web site, and the number of people who go see the movie." Studios are now releasing more than one trailer per film to build hype, along with clips, behind-the-scenes footage, and interviews, all on the Web.

While the studios get their act together and make use of all those sounds and visuals at their fingertips, the audience is ready and waiting. Sites are reporting consistently high traffic to the movie-related features. "On the RealPlayer we have a series of channels, and the screening room channel, which features the trailers, is consistently one of the most popular channels," says Mohl. And while reluctant to estimate the average traffic an average trailer receives, Mohl indicates that in the first quarter of 2001, RealNetworks saw 28 million media hits for film assets, including clips, interviews and trailers.