Media Magazine article below about the marketing campaign behind JJ Abrams' (he directed the new Star Trek) film Cloverfield.
Makes interesting reading in terms of the ways in which new media, particularly viral marketing, is being used to build audience awareness for films.
You might find you can refer to this campaign in the exam. It does not matter that this is a hollywood film.
Post a comment - what do you think of this style of viral marketing? What advantages does it have for both institutions and audiences? What potential disadvantages does it have?
A Monster of a Marketing Campaign!
Constructed specifically as a ‘monster movie for the YouTube generation, Cloverfield built a viral marketing campaign – and its own audience – through an enigmatic teaser-trailer, word of mouth and a widget. Its innovative uses of an alternative reality, games and videocam techniques involve audiences in new and interactive ways. Steph Hendry explores the Cloverfield universe.
With a very low production budget in Hollywood terms (£15m), Cloverfield became an instant financial success making £22 million in its opening weekend. It is a recent example of the power of viral marketing (sometimes called user-generated marketing) to create audience interest before a film’s release and, most importantly, to get people into the cinema. Whether or not Cloverfield is a good film is up to you to decide (critics are divided); but it stands as a great example of the way modern marketers are using a range of methods to attempt to reach their audience and sell a film.
The film’s media language choice of an ‘eye-witness’ presentation of the story using a hand-held camera acts as a representation of our current technological age. Cloverfield’s marketing also makes use of recent developments in technology and changes in audience activity and behaviour to create and sustain interest. The director (Matt Reeves) called the film ‘a monster movie for the YouTube generation’ indicating that the producers of this film were specifically aware that their target audience were internet-literate young people. It is these people who have been the targets for the marketing campaign and have also been encouraged to be a part of it.
The first glimpse
The first anyone knew of the film was a teaser trailer shown before the 2007 summer blockbuster Transformers. The trailer did not name the film and only gave a release date after showing glimpses of an apparently home-made video of New York being attacked by ‘something’, culminating in the shocking image of the head of the Statue of Liberty crashing through a New York street. By creating memorable images and using an unconventional method to present the events, the filmmakers were using a tried-and-tested marketing device, the creation of enigma (mystery). Creating audience curiosity is a great way to generate interest in a product. Those who saw the trailer would have been left wondering what they had just seen: What genre was the film alluding to (Sci-Fi/Disaster/Monster)? Why was the footage they had been shown more like their own home-movies rather than a slick Hollywood production?
The trailer’s placement gives an indication of the target audience, one which is a difficult market for advertisers at the moment: teens and, more specifically, young adults. These groups are becoming hard to reach for advertisers who rely on conventional methods. Young adults tend not to watch TV on a predictable, regular basis and often have access to multi-channel cable television which fragments the audience across a range of channels. Devices like Sky+ mean they can record television programmes, watch them when they choose and fast-forward through any advertising. Alternative methods of viewing television programmes also make this audience hard to find. ‘On demand’, downloads and YouTube split the audience further and this is the generation that is likely to wait to buy television programmes and films on DVD rather than watch them in traditional settings surrounded by advertising. Alternative advertising methods were needed if Cloverfield was going to be able to attract the attention of the group of people who could be used to help make the film a success in the cinema. A specialised online and computer savvy audience was specifically targeted as their interaction with the marketing was vital in the film generating interest from another valuable audience group, the mainstream movie-goer. The story of Cloverfield’s marketing shows how the online audience was used to create a buzz about the film to support a more traditional marketing campaign.
Building the campaign
The teaser trailer provided one piece of important information, the name of the producer JJ Abrams. This would have created a number of genre expectations. Abrams is the creator of Alias and Lost and so the audience could expect an element of Sci-Fi/Horror within this film and might anticipate a narrative that was complex, fragmented and laden with ‘clues’ rather than explanations. Web searches after the teaser trailer led the audience to a website named only as the date of the film’s release (www.1-08-08.com). This site slowly released photos which were time and date stamped to allow the audience to build up chronological glimpses into the narrative of the film.
The enigma and the slow release of information were both constructed to encourage discussion online in blogs, social networks and chat rooms, which was how the real marketing took place via ‘word of mouth’. Web-chatter was heightened on the release of a poster showing a decapitated Statue of Liberty, a devastated New York and the release of a second, more detailed trailer. Still maintaining the mystery, the trailer’s exposition contained a chilling geographical marker identifying the location of events to be in the ‘area formally known as Central Park’. For the first time the film’s title was identified and the trailer was released online along with an official movie website (www.cloverfieldmovie.com) which eventually provided links to MySpace and Facebook pages ‘created’ by some of the characters from the film. These regularly updated pages created a real-time story which showed the characters moving towards the eventful night and provided a back-story to the film itself. The MySpace blog was where the film’s protagonist announced he was moving to Japan to take a new job at Slusho!, a Japanese soft drinks company, which explains why the film begins with a going away party.
In addition a widget was available for download from the website. This piece of software could be attached to MySpace pages, blogs etc. and contained the first five minutes of the film with an introduction by JJ Abrams. To download and use the widget people needed to register their contact details. This registration immediately entered people into a competition based on who managed to distribute the widget to the most people; a direct encouragement of more ‘word of mouth’ marketing.
Adverts were sent to mobile phones, traditional posters and TV slots were also used and the culmination of all these events was an increasing public and mainstream press awareness of the film. The campaign was creating a deep curiosity as so much information had been held back and the only way for the audience to gain answers to the questions the marketing raised was to go to the cinema to see the film. As the character Hud said in the second trailer, with this much interest it was almost inevitable that ‘people are gonna want to know how it all went down’.
But that’s not all...
Parallel to this campaign, a related story was being told through an ARG (alternative reality game). The ARG centred around a fictional Japanese company called Tagruato and its subsidiary Slusho! and only a few direct connections were made to the Cloverfield plot. Home pages for Slusho! and Tagruato were put online. The former ran a competition for audience members to create adverts for the frozen soft drink whose USP was its addictive nature (‘You can’t drink just six’) and the happiness it would bring its consumer. (Remember, Slusho! was the company the character Rob from the film was taking a job with.)
Tagruato‘s corporate homepage looks like a conventional business website – even down to experiencing hacks by ‘eco-terrorists’. It appeared that Slusho’s key ingredient, ‘seabed nectar’, might not be entirely safe. The site reported that a drilling rig in the Atlantic Ocean had been mysteriously destroyed. ‘TV reports’ based on mobile phone footage showed huge chunks of debris being hurled from the sinking rig although there was no explanation for this phenomenon. Pictures from the scene were added to www.1-01-08.com.
There’s more...
A Manhattan couple, ‘Jamie and Teddy’ set up a website to post video-blogs to stay in touch after Teddy had gone to Japan to work for Tagruato. Jamie assumed she had been dumped as she hadn’t heard from Teddy for over a month when she received a package containing a Tagurato baseball cap, something wrapped in tin-foil (which she was instructed not to eat) and a recorded message indicating Teddy was in some sort of trouble. Interpreting this as a sick practical joke, she assumed he had a new ‘skanky’ girlfriend and decided to eat the gooey product she received. Almost immediately she appears to become extremely intoxicated. Jamie makes a brief appearance in Cloverfield where the audience can glimpse her passed out on the sofa at Rob’s leaving do in the opening scene of the film.
Marketing + movie = more mystery
The addition of a number of back stories to the Cloverfield tale, without giving clear ideas of ‘cause and effect’ encourages the audience to attempt to build a story for themselves; first of all to attempt to make sense of the promotional material and, after watching the film, to supplement the limited information provided by the film’s highly restricted narration. The marketing has created a ‘Cloverfield universe’ bigger than the events of the 90-minute film, but has held back on providing enough information to give resolution to all the mysteries. The film’s story is told from the point of view of people who (just like the target audience) have very little information as to what is occurring around them; the characters just catch snippets of information in news reports and in conversations with the military (just like the audience). The viral marketing, the ARG and then the video-cam style presentation all enhance audience identification with the characters and this heightens the shocking nature of the events we witness with them in the film. The desire to make sense of the events unfolding within the film has been played on for both the interactive and mainstream audience but the filmmakers are still holding back vital pieces of information: What does Slusho! have to do with all of this? Where did the monster come from? Do the military manage to destroy the monster? Do any of the characters from the film survive?
Cloverfield 2
Could the actual film Cloverfield be just another element in a complex marketing campaign? Is the film an expensive advert for yet another product still to be made? There are online rumours already about a Cloverfield 2 with theories ranging from the sequel being told from another ‘victim’s’ perspective (plenty of people can be seen filming events in the film) or from a military or reporter’s point of view. Maybe Cloverfield 2 will be a standard blockbuster movie with omniscient narration and a solid resolution. At this point the ‘truth’ is irrelevant. What is important is that people are talking about a potential second film and so the viral campaign has already begun.
Constructed specifically as a ‘monster movie for the YouTube generation, Cloverfield built a viral marketing campaign – and its own audience – through an enigmatic teaser-trailer, word of mouth and a widget. Its innovative uses of an alternative reality, games and videocam techniques involve audiences in new and interactive ways. Steph Hendry explores the Cloverfield universe.
With a very low production budget in Hollywood terms (£15m), Cloverfield became an instant financial success making £22 million in its opening weekend. It is a recent example of the power of viral marketing (sometimes called user-generated marketing) to create audience interest before a film’s release and, most importantly, to get people into the cinema. Whether or not Cloverfield is a good film is up to you to decide (critics are divided); but it stands as a great example of the way modern marketers are using a range of methods to attempt to reach their audience and sell a film.
The film’s media language choice of an ‘eye-witness’ presentation of the story using a hand-held camera acts as a representation of our current technological age. Cloverfield’s marketing also makes use of recent developments in technology and changes in audience activity and behaviour to create and sustain interest. The director (Matt Reeves) called the film ‘a monster movie for the YouTube generation’ indicating that the producers of this film were specifically aware that their target audience were internet-literate young people. It is these people who have been the targets for the marketing campaign and have also been encouraged to be a part of it.
The first glimpse
The first anyone knew of the film was a teaser trailer shown before the 2007 summer blockbuster Transformers. The trailer did not name the film and only gave a release date after showing glimpses of an apparently home-made video of New York being attacked by ‘something’, culminating in the shocking image of the head of the Statue of Liberty crashing through a New York street. By creating memorable images and using an unconventional method to present the events, the filmmakers were using a tried-and-tested marketing device, the creation of enigma (mystery). Creating audience curiosity is a great way to generate interest in a product. Those who saw the trailer would have been left wondering what they had just seen: What genre was the film alluding to (Sci-Fi/Disaster/Monster)? Why was the footage they had been shown more like their own home-movies rather than a slick Hollywood production?
The trailer’s placement gives an indication of the target audience, one which is a difficult market for advertisers at the moment: teens and, more specifically, young adults. These groups are becoming hard to reach for advertisers who rely on conventional methods. Young adults tend not to watch TV on a predictable, regular basis and often have access to multi-channel cable television which fragments the audience across a range of channels. Devices like Sky+ mean they can record television programmes, watch them when they choose and fast-forward through any advertising. Alternative methods of viewing television programmes also make this audience hard to find. ‘On demand’, downloads and YouTube split the audience further and this is the generation that is likely to wait to buy television programmes and films on DVD rather than watch them in traditional settings surrounded by advertising. Alternative advertising methods were needed if Cloverfield was going to be able to attract the attention of the group of people who could be used to help make the film a success in the cinema. A specialised online and computer savvy audience was specifically targeted as their interaction with the marketing was vital in the film generating interest from another valuable audience group, the mainstream movie-goer. The story of Cloverfield’s marketing shows how the online audience was used to create a buzz about the film to support a more traditional marketing campaign.
Building the campaign
The teaser trailer provided one piece of important information, the name of the producer JJ Abrams. This would have created a number of genre expectations. Abrams is the creator of Alias and Lost and so the audience could expect an element of Sci-Fi/Horror within this film and might anticipate a narrative that was complex, fragmented and laden with ‘clues’ rather than explanations. Web searches after the teaser trailer led the audience to a website named only as the date of the film’s release (www.1-08-08.com). This site slowly released photos which were time and date stamped to allow the audience to build up chronological glimpses into the narrative of the film.
The enigma and the slow release of information were both constructed to encourage discussion online in blogs, social networks and chat rooms, which was how the real marketing took place via ‘word of mouth’. Web-chatter was heightened on the release of a poster showing a decapitated Statue of Liberty, a devastated New York and the release of a second, more detailed trailer. Still maintaining the mystery, the trailer’s exposition contained a chilling geographical marker identifying the location of events to be in the ‘area formally known as Central Park’. For the first time the film’s title was identified and the trailer was released online along with an official movie website (www.cloverfieldmovie.com) which eventually provided links to MySpace and Facebook pages ‘created’ by some of the characters from the film. These regularly updated pages created a real-time story which showed the characters moving towards the eventful night and provided a back-story to the film itself. The MySpace blog was where the film’s protagonist announced he was moving to Japan to take a new job at Slusho!, a Japanese soft drinks company, which explains why the film begins with a going away party.
In addition a widget was available for download from the website. This piece of software could be attached to MySpace pages, blogs etc. and contained the first five minutes of the film with an introduction by JJ Abrams. To download and use the widget people needed to register their contact details. This registration immediately entered people into a competition based on who managed to distribute the widget to the most people; a direct encouragement of more ‘word of mouth’ marketing.
Adverts were sent to mobile phones, traditional posters and TV slots were also used and the culmination of all these events was an increasing public and mainstream press awareness of the film. The campaign was creating a deep curiosity as so much information had been held back and the only way for the audience to gain answers to the questions the marketing raised was to go to the cinema to see the film. As the character Hud said in the second trailer, with this much interest it was almost inevitable that ‘people are gonna want to know how it all went down’.
But that’s not all...
Parallel to this campaign, a related story was being told through an ARG (alternative reality game). The ARG centred around a fictional Japanese company called Tagruato and its subsidiary Slusho! and only a few direct connections were made to the Cloverfield plot. Home pages for Slusho! and Tagruato were put online. The former ran a competition for audience members to create adverts for the frozen soft drink whose USP was its addictive nature (‘You can’t drink just six’) and the happiness it would bring its consumer. (Remember, Slusho! was the company the character Rob from the film was taking a job with.)
Tagruato‘s corporate homepage looks like a conventional business website – even down to experiencing hacks by ‘eco-terrorists’. It appeared that Slusho’s key ingredient, ‘seabed nectar’, might not be entirely safe. The site reported that a drilling rig in the Atlantic Ocean had been mysteriously destroyed. ‘TV reports’ based on mobile phone footage showed huge chunks of debris being hurled from the sinking rig although there was no explanation for this phenomenon. Pictures from the scene were added to www.1-01-08.com.
There’s more...
A Manhattan couple, ‘Jamie and Teddy’ set up a website to post video-blogs to stay in touch after Teddy had gone to Japan to work for Tagruato. Jamie assumed she had been dumped as she hadn’t heard from Teddy for over a month when she received a package containing a Tagurato baseball cap, something wrapped in tin-foil (which she was instructed not to eat) and a recorded message indicating Teddy was in some sort of trouble. Interpreting this as a sick practical joke, she assumed he had a new ‘skanky’ girlfriend and decided to eat the gooey product she received. Almost immediately she appears to become extremely intoxicated. Jamie makes a brief appearance in Cloverfield where the audience can glimpse her passed out on the sofa at Rob’s leaving do in the opening scene of the film.
Marketing + movie = more mystery
The addition of a number of back stories to the Cloverfield tale, without giving clear ideas of ‘cause and effect’ encourages the audience to attempt to build a story for themselves; first of all to attempt to make sense of the promotional material and, after watching the film, to supplement the limited information provided by the film’s highly restricted narration. The marketing has created a ‘Cloverfield universe’ bigger than the events of the 90-minute film, but has held back on providing enough information to give resolution to all the mysteries. The film’s story is told from the point of view of people who (just like the target audience) have very little information as to what is occurring around them; the characters just catch snippets of information in news reports and in conversations with the military (just like the audience). The viral marketing, the ARG and then the video-cam style presentation all enhance audience identification with the characters and this heightens the shocking nature of the events we witness with them in the film. The desire to make sense of the events unfolding within the film has been played on for both the interactive and mainstream audience but the filmmakers are still holding back vital pieces of information: What does Slusho! have to do with all of this? Where did the monster come from? Do the military manage to destroy the monster? Do any of the characters from the film survive?
Cloverfield 2
Could the actual film Cloverfield be just another element in a complex marketing campaign? Is the film an expensive advert for yet another product still to be made? There are online rumours already about a Cloverfield 2 with theories ranging from the sequel being told from another ‘victim’s’ perspective (plenty of people can be seen filming events in the film) or from a military or reporter’s point of view. Maybe Cloverfield 2 will be a standard blockbuster movie with omniscient narration and a solid resolution. At this point the ‘truth’ is irrelevant. What is important is that people are talking about a potential second film and so the viral campaign has already begun.
Definitions
ARG – alternative reality game: A set of interlinked sources, mostly websites, along with voicemails, scavenger hunts and even novels, which shed light on a hidden story. ARGs challenge players to make connections and solve puzzles to piece together a ‘distributed narrative’.
Widget: A piece of software that can be used to embed content into a web page.
Steph Hendry is an advanced lecturer and course leader at Runshaw College, Letyland. She is an examiner for AQA Media Studies, and a freelance trainer.
First published in MediaMagazine 24, April 2008.
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