CLOVERFIELD: Marketing the American Godzilla

Last week, I spent 2 hours of my life learning about Slusho drinks and Tagruato's deep sea drilling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, first go watch the trailers for Cloverfield (first the teaser, then the full trailer).

Now, in one sense, Cloverfield isn't unique at all—it looks like a retelling of a tired genre, the Japanese monster movie. In another sense, however, it's innovative because it tells that story from the point of view of a small group of people. Unlike Godzilla, a monster which also attacks New York (why New York? Why not Charleston, West Virginia [thanks for the correction, Joe!] or Flagstaff, Arizona?), the viewer will probably have more invested in what happens to the main characters. It's like Blair Witch meets 9/11 and Godzilla. It's not surprising J. J. Abrams is behind this project—Cloverfield is a close cousin of Lost: put people you care about in an insane situation and see how they react.

Lost's popularity lays in the "peeling of the onion"—the more layers you peel back, the more layers you find. Each answer only gives you more questions. Of course, foreplay only lasts so long and some viewers have become frustrated with Lost's serpentine plotlines, while others are drawn to the story's emotional core: its characters. As in real life, Lost's story comes to you in scattered pieces of information. Like Ian Fassburg used to say, "A woman who's almost naked is far sexier than a woman who's totally naked." Viewers like to be given a challenge, a puzzle to figure out.

This is why Cloverfield looks to be such a great film. By framing the story from the point of view of strangers, without the benefit of any omniscient "meanwhile..." cutaways, the viewer is immediately handicapped and must struggle along with the characters to make sense of the impossible. A monster attack? What monster? How big is it? Where did it come from? What damage is it doing? What does it look like? Can it even be beaten? What will happen to us? What will happen to the city? What will happen to the world? These questions are visceral, emotional, atavistic. The trailer exploits that by piggybacking on the fears of another cataclysmic attack like 9/11... it's not by coincidence the characters witness a huge explosion from a Manhattan rooftop.

Some other simple tricks to hook the viewer into the story—the release date synchs up to the story's time, so photos taken in the film (and posted on the official web site, pictured at left) are datestamped to when the film is set for release... so the viewer will be able to easily imagine they're watching a live telecast. The first trailers didn't even list a movie title, just 1-18-08, the release date of the film. Even after the title was released, Abrams said the only official web site for the movie is www.1-18-08.com, but as of today there's nothing much on that site except for a few photographs. Flipping the photographs on 1-18-08.com (it's a Flash site) gives you more information about the characters, which leads—with some detective work—to their Myspace profiles:

myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/jamielascano
myspace.com/robbyhawkins
myspace.com/hudsonplatt
myspace.com/jj_hawkins
myspace.com/lily_ford
myspace.com/marlenadiamond
myspace.com/beth_mcintyre

Look at each profile carefully—each person has each other person's profile in their top 8 friends list. Clever!

Rumors were also circulated that the film's title was to be called Slusho. Slusho? What the hell is that? A Google search for "Slusho" yields Slusho.jp as the top result, which appears to have nothing to do with Cloverfield... at first glance.

But look closer: the site has a commercial contest where the public can submit their own commercial for Slusho. The address for contest submission is Bold Futura, LLC, 1223 Wilshire Boulevard, No. 1422, Santa Monica, CA 90403. Huh? What's a Japanese company doing with a Santa Monica address?

Researching Bold Futura, LLC took me to boldfutura.org, which was live when I saw it, but is now defunct. From that site, I first heard about their affiliate company, Tagruato, a deep sea drilling company. A glance at Tagruato's web site, tagruato.jp, shows an interactive map of deep sea drilling; their most recent, and biggest, drilling rig is in the Atlantic Ocean, not far from New York City... Googling Tagruato led me to an intriguing blog at tagruato.blogspot.com, which appears to be run by a Greenpeace-like group blaming Tagruato for destroying our oceans. On that blog, they claim to have received notes from whistle-blowers inside the deep sea drilling company that "bad things are happening."

ALL these sites have been created to promote Cloverfield and, without realizing it, you can easily get pulled into this alternate reality and start to care about the characters listed on Myspace. This kind of marketing isn't new—it's called "immersive entertainment" and it's been used for films before. The goal is to create a world where easter eggs are sprinkled across multiple web sites for those curious enough to seek them out. When someone finds a new piece of the puzzle, they discuss its meaning and import with others and the end result is a phenomenal word of mouth about the movie. I mean, look at me... I'm practically a walking advertisement for a movie I haven't even seen yet.

I had so much fun learning about this marketing campaign that I just had to buy my own Slusho T-shirt and baseball hat... I'm told the box it arrives in includes newspaper stuffing offering even more clues about the movie!



If you want to know the complete lowdown about the ad campagin, here's a real site which lays out everything currently known about each of the sites listed above:
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20546

And don't forget to see Cloverfield on January 18th!

Today's Sidesplitter

This commercial, directed by Spike Jonze, is the kind of filmmaking I love:

Remember "Cog"?

About a year ago, I talked about Honda's famous viral commercial, Cog. When I showed Cog to my filmmaking friend Max, and told him that its complicated Rube-Goldberg-like chain reaction had not been done with CGI but had been shot as live action in 606 takes with a price tag of $6 million, his reaction was firm and unshakable: "I don't believe it. No way. Uh-uh." Not that I can blame him—that was exactly how Honda execs reacted, too!

And today, I'm glad to say I can show Max that Cog was a live action shoot. I found a four minute documentary showing how Cog was made, and it still blows my mind. As I've said before, Cog isn't simply a great commercial—it's great filmmaking, and on every level. Its initial concept, the ingenuity of the chain reaction's design, the perfect execution of its filming, and the sound... my god, the sound... just listen to the hum of that rotating metal piece! Amazing. Really, when people go to this much effort to film something, they deserve to have their work shown as far and as wide as possible.

Here's the four minute documentary on the making of Cog:

And, again, here's Cog:

The Company in the White Suit

In The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guiness plays a scientist who invents a highly durable fabric that never gets dirty. You can imagine the cascading reactions to this incredible invention... first, "This is great! We'll only have to make one suit for everyone!" and then, "This is horrible! Everyone in the clothing business will be out of a job!" Guiness' character goes from hero to villain in a heartbeat.

This is the conundrum of our modern world: with each new technological invention, significant social and economic changes are sure to follow and how you react to these changes will place you in one of two camps: the Industrial Age camp, which favors stable and steady-paying jobs, or the Information Age camp, which favors innovation and efficiency. Eventually, the Industrial Age camp will become extinct and the transition to the Information Age will be extremely painful for everyone still holding an Industrial Age mindset... people always fight nail and tooth to protect their lifestyle because change and growth hurts.

The cultural and economic differences of these two camps are stark: Industrial Age countries like France, where the unions are all powerful, have static economies and higher unemployment. It's tougher to be fired there, so inefficient workers are able to stay with a company longer. Information Age countries like America have companies not loyal to particular employees and thus can fire workers whenever they have to. Information Age companies are more dynamic and can compete better because they save more money.

America isn't totally an Information Age country, but it's getting there. American title companies outsource their online title research to the Philippines because they can get 10 queries per dollar spent vs. 1 query per dollar using America workers. More money saved = more profitable business = more wealth = better economy = more information age jobs.

When desktop computers were introduced to help design British newspapers in the 80s, the British typesetters' union went on strike for weeks... but today all British newspapers are laid out with desktop computers. And now newspapers aren't really in the publishing business—they're in the news providing business. Focus too much on how many newspapers you're selling and you'll be out on the street in a couple of years. Focus instead on how to make money from the content on your news website and you'll keep pace with the winds of change.

The other day, a friend was saying that iPods weren't the best product on the market, that he listens to music on a competing product (which I won't mention because I'm a mean and venom-spewing reptile). Here was my response:

While Apple may not have the best product, they're like McDonald's in they they don't make the best hamburgers, but they have the best system to deliver it. Well, maybe not the best, but Apple has managed to convert, and retain, people like me into cultists.

It's no secret Steve Jobs was at the center of that innovation. And when he left Apple, everything went corporate again. It lost its flair. But when Jobs came back in from the cold, he did it again: Jobs envisioned Apple as being at the center of the digital lifestyle. iPods are only one piece of his grand plan; if you snap digital photos, create graphic novels, listen to or create digital music or movies... you name it—if it's digital, Apple now has sleekly designed software and hardware to do it. Best of all, the software and hardware all talk to each other seamlessly. That's the power of the Apple brand—interoperability. Apple's cool parts make one head-shakingly cool whole.

The iPod was only Apple's first strategic lure for PC users into Apple-ness. It worked like butter, and the iPod's various incarnations have consistently tricked more PC users into using a minimalist version of Apple's snazzy OS X. This led to more and more buzz... by the time Apple's iPhone came out this month, my PC user friends were practically salivating over it. Even I, the perennial Mac user, didn't care that much for it... but they're going crazy! I knew Apple had been planning this for many years, but it's the first time I'd seen tangible results of their branding campaign. You can get a glimpse of Apple's marketing strategy by looking at this:

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)


Actor Brian Dennehy was explaining in an interview that he wasn't more famous because he "hadn't created a need for Brian Dennehy". You can be the best actor or writer or businessman in the world, but if nobody knows about you and nobody knows why they need your product over the competition's product, you might as well hang up the spurs. As you illustrated with Apple, you need not even have the best product, either—the loudest person shouting always gets the most attention.

A musician on the street plays his guitar—if you like it, you give him money, but you're not obligated to. This is called busking and the rules of Darwinism dictate that if the musician doesn't get enough money dropped in his hat, he eventually starves and chooses a different job. At least with his hat out there, he still has a chance of making enough money to keep making music. Napster elevated busking into a highly efficient system of thievery by letting anyone hear the best musicians in the world while also throwing away the artists' hats. So if everything that musicians and movie producers produce can be copied onto a CD or DVD for free, how (and why) would they ever make more content? There's no incentive.

Then along came iTunes. Want to see the entire first season of 24 for only $35? Why not? It's easier and faster than downloading them all off eDonkey or Limewire. Want to listen to a particular recording of Gilbert & Sullivan's "A British Tar"? Download it for only 99¢. Apple had finally found a healthy business model to generate revenue from distributing digital entertainment. It was secure. It worked. The catch? You have to watch all your downloaded movies with iTunes and listen to all the music either on iTunes or with your iPod. Apple created the business model—so they set the rules. You don't like the rules? Don't use their system.

Apple's overt strategy has been to switch PC users to the Mac platform so more consumers buy Mac computers and the iPod was thought to be the best bait to accomplish that goal. Thus, Apple mandated that no iTunes purchases can be played on anything other than Apple's hardware. That's kind of harsh if you prefer other hardware, but it's all part of Apple's plan to get people hooked on Macs. France has already passed a law to break that stranglehold and today a growing number of European countries are joining that fight:

European drive against iTunes builds support
10:44 a.m. EST, January 23, 2007

OSLO, Norway (AP) -- German and French consumer groups have joined a Nordic-led drive to force Apple Inc. to make its iTunes online store compatible with digital music players made by rival companies, a Norwegian official said Monday.

Currently, songs purchased and downloaded through iTunes are designed to work with Apple's market-leading iPod players but not competitors' models, including those using Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media system. Likewise, iPods generally can't play copy-protected music sold through non-Apple stores.

Last June, consumer agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden claimed that Apple was violating contract and copyright laws in their countries.

Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said French consumer lobby UFC-Que Choisir and its German counterpart, Ferbraucherzentralen, joined the effort late last year, and other European countries are considering it. Finland's Kuluttajavirasto consumer group is also part of the effort.

"This is important because Germany and France are European giants," Thon said. "Germany, in particular, is a big market for digital music."

The Nordic regulators have met Apple officials at least twice on the complaints.

"Apple is aware of the concerns we've heard from several agencies in Europe and we're looking forward to resolving these issues as quickly as possible," Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr said Monday.

"Apple hopes that European governments will encourage a competitive environment that lets innovation thrive, protects intellectual property and allows consumers to decide which products are successful."

Thon said Norway gave Apple until September to change its polices, or face possible legal action and fines in the country.

"It cannot be good for the music industry for them to lock music into one system," he said.

A French law that allows regulators to force Apple to make its iPod player and iTunes store compatible with rival offerings went into effect in August.

Apple has been working to expand its iPod sales in Europe and said during its quarterly report last week its advertising and sales efforts were paying off.

Company officials say the iPod gained market share in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Austria and Denmark during the holiday period.

Governments, not shareholders, are telling businesses what to do??? Apple has created a business model that works—and now Europeans want to change it. Instead of voting with their wallet by giving their money to one of Apple's competitors, they've chosen to walk into a Rolls Royce car lot and scream until they get a hybrid. Has anyone ever wondered why there are no other significant competitors in the digital entertainment distribution market? Nobody else has found a profitable business model! It's not like all potential competitors are being discouraged from creating products that distribute digital entertainment—it's just that Apple is the only company that's created a viable format for producers and consumers.

What makes this story even more interesting is that Apple makes its bread and butter from selling hardware, which is an Industrial Age commodity... whereas iTunes is a multi-platform software that sells content—an Information Age commodity. Apple is obviously migrating its revenue stream from one camp to the other, but until that migration is complete, Apple still needs those iPod sales, which means keeping a lock (for now) on their proprietary iTunes format for as long as they can.

Who will adapt to whom—Apple or Europe? Either way, it's going to hurt. Change always does.