Two things I love: 1) movies and 2) experiencing an awesome sales experience. Combine the two and I’m quite happy to suspend any and all beliefs to go along for the ride. Late last year I buckled up for a few hours sleuthing the online popcorn trail of JJ Abrams new film Cloverfield.

Do you remember The Blair Witch Project? Way back in 1999, snippets from the movie were seeded onto the internet. These trails fed into a website packed with documentation which added authenticity to the movie’s plotline. This was an extremely successful campaign for the film, which in turn delivered on its hype with big returns at the Box Office. How about Snakes on a Plane? The interwebs were writhing with fan-based content for that one, the kind of word-of-mouth activity marketers can only dream of. By all accounts, the viral activity was way more fun than the actual movie. Then in 2005 there was the case of Joss Whedon’s huge fan-base promoting his Firefly-on-the-big-screen Serenity on blogs, forums and buttons – unfortunately, when the film didn’t gross as predicted, the studio decided to pack up it’s bat and ball and sued those same fans for infringing copyright – the fans, in turn, invoiced the studio US$2.1M for marketing the film in the first place.

All fun and games in the online movie-marketing space.

Now we have Cloverfield – a film by JJ Abrams: best known for the television series Felicity, Alias and Lost, which alone has hooked a dedicated audience of web-active, articulate followers. The man knows how to make sticky television. Can he translate that to the big screen?

The Cloverfield seed was first planted with a titleless trailer which played before the Transformers movie in July 2007. This generated a lot of curiosity and discussion about what exactly this movie is about. A Cloverfield titled trailer followed which fuelled the speculation. Information and clues have steadily appeared online and keeps the appetite of those who are hot on the Cloverfield trail whet leading up to the launch date of January 18th. The breadcrumbs to look for include a trail of real and fake websites creating an alternate reality where the film’s characters and plotlines live far beyond the edges of the celluloid.

This kind of fake viral marking has to be done right, though. While some companies like Quicksilver get it right with slick fake viral video advertising like their Dynamite Surfing, some just open up a whole can of worms and get it wrong – just ask Sony how their fake blog and graffiti videos fared promoting the PSP. What a lot of agencies don’t “get”, is trust is the currency of the Internet – folk don’t like being lied to: they don’t mind “playing along” but they do not enjoy being told they have believed something that was deliberately not true.

Campaigns need to be slick enough to be believable, but with just enough flaws to enable the customer to understand they’re playing along. Cloverfield manages this, and hits its demographic right between the eyes and they love it. No doubt about it, utilising Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG) as advertising is turning out to be an extremely powerful tool heating up the movie marketing space for 2008.

If you’d like to follow some of the online clues to find out what the movie is about before it’s release on January 18th 2008, check out some of these links:

• “Exploring our world. Ensuring your future.“
• “You can’t drink just six!“
• “Tagruato is destroying our oceans. We are The Wave, rising tall to crash over them and wash the filth away.“
• Jamie’s Vlog (Password: jllovesth)
• Cloverfield Clues Blogspot
• Cloverfield Forums
• Robby Hawkins
• Beth McIntyre
• Lily Ford
• JJ Hawkins
• Hudson Platt
• Jamie Lascano
• Marlena Diamond