IN THIS ISSUE: April 25, 2001 To Archive Index Wow! Web Marketing is Changed Forever What We Do

Brilliant Marketing Spielberg's New "AI" Changes Internet Marketing Forever

Once in a great while, something comes along that changes everything. The Beatles first albumö the first PCöthe cell phone. From the day they appeared, everything else in their category paled by comparison and became outdated. Well, folks, happy days are here again!

Go to www.google.com and search on the name Jeanine Salla. The results will bring you into an online world unlike any ever created. A world of intrigue, threats, murder, suicidal robots, power and personality.

Guaranteed: you'll be involved - and most likely hooked - as soon as you see the brilliant transmedia marketing campaign for the upcoming Steven Spielberg movie, "AI," (which stands for artificial intelligence.)

The marketing for "AI" makes the barrier-smashing "Blair Witch" campaign look like, well, a walk in the woods. You've never seen anything like the "AI" campaign. One thing is certain: "AI's "marketing raises the crossbar for web marketing forever - and not just in the entertainment category.

Transmedia Wizardry

Curious film freaks have been sent in circles by a complex series of more than 20 phony sites based on characters believed to be taken from the closely guarded script. The Google search leads you through a complicated tangle of linked sites with stories that may or may not be part of the movie, but which already have a life of their own.

This campaign is an extraordinary example of the transmedia revolution being led by the entertainment industry -- which is giving consumers a direct opportunity to affect and even create content. (Transmedia marketing, sometimes called "convergence," refers to marketing that involves several types of media.)

Jude Law and Haley Joel Osment, the actors who star in the movie, which is set for July 4th release, are not part of the online campaign. Instead, as we dig through this oddly realistic world, we are led deeper and deeper into a world where humans and sentient robots co-exist. We learn that there has been a recent rash of robo-suicides and we are invited to try and figure out why.

We learn (or do we) about the intimate details of sentient machine therapist Jeanine Salla's life and meet several of her friends and acquaintances (maybe.) The many sites are designed to look very different from each other. Some look corporate and some look home-made. All are intriguing in one way or another, as they must be to keep viewers in the fold.

Brave New World?

You can figure out ways to hack into private accounts of the characters to see what is going on behind the scenes. You can read "private" messages that are hidden in the HTML source code. Once you register, you may receive threatening emails that vaguely refer to actions and characters you have read about as you follow your search.

Included in the sites are magazines, corporations, universities, repair shops, architecture and political movements, all browsable. A child character from the movie appears online as a man - but since so little is known about the movie script, even though the film is in the can, no one is sure. 

"AI" is thought to be the last brainchild of reclusive director Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999 just before his final movie, "Eyes Wide Shut," opened. Spielberg and Kubrick are said to have traded 750 pages of notes for the movie back and forth before Kubrick's death. 

Until "Blair Witch" came along, movie promotion consisted of online Flash games, production photos from the sets, character's "diaries" and downloadable wallpaper screens. Movies have tried to pull web viewers into the plots, but no campaign holds a candle to the one for "AI". The campaign's online story is so well-constructed that following it quickly becomes an obsession. 

The web will become more and more collaborative, usability expert Brenda Laurel of the Nielsen Norman Group maintains, with users increasingly having a hand in creating content. "Letting fans create material for a web site goes against the traditional instincts of protecting intellectual property," says Laurel, but it actually helps to keep the property alive.

Passing It On

The beauty of this type of marketing is that transmedia content will be kept from deteriorating into sales pitches by collaborative peer review, with users rating the value of the content supplied by the filmmakers and other users. If fans don't like the "AI" material and don't pass it on to their friends, it will die. Instead, it's created a groundswell of interest.

On the www.aintitcool.com web site message boards, reviews of the sites in the marketing campaign spread virally throughout the web, sent from friend to friend as a "you gotta see this" message.

The features of the "AI" campaign and others in the entertainment industry will soon translate into economic models for transmedia retail and corporate sites as the Web moves to broadband. 

In the meantime, hurry and save a robot from suicide. Get involved. Get inspired. Raise the crossbar on the marketing of your business.

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