Your Cloverfield Update for 7/12/07

Hope you all didn’t think that nothing was happening on the Cloverfield front just because I didn’t do an update yesterday.

Again, if you need a beginner’s overview of the online components of the official and unofficial (though it’s not noted) aspects of what’s popped up so far.
Rex also has a good round-up of some of the links, both new and old, that have popped up.
Felix Vasquez Jr. at the FilmThreat blog has been following the developments as they occur and bringing together some of the theories that are floating out there.

There’s something that’s occurring to me about this campaign, especially in light of the denial by J.J. Abrams that some of the Ethan Haas websites were not part of the viral marketing campaign for the movie. My thought runs like this: It now doesn’t matter what a company’s official marketing campaign is. The online world, like nature, abhors a vacuum. So, in the absence of a slew of slights that provide clues to the truth of the movie, people will simply create them.

So Paramount and Abrams now find themselves in a tricky situation. Anything they officially create to be part of an online “viral” marketing effort will almost have to be explicitly branded as such in order to truly matter in the campaign. Otherwise, without making it clear to the reader that this is a movie site, it risks being drowned out by the unofficial sites people have created to further their own ideas as to the mysteries surrounding the movie.

Let’s look at the Technorati links to some of the sites in question:

1-18-08.com (official): 857 links
Slusho.jp (official, by all accounts): 143 links
Ethanhaaswasright (unofficial): 782 links
Ethanhasswaswrong (unofficial): 423 links

That’s just a sampling, but look at that: the two unofficial sites have an incredible amount of links, signifying a good amount of blog discussion that’s included them. The only site that beats them is the main site, one that is the only one to be specifically pegged as an officially created site.

If I were in Paramount’s offices right now I would be advising extreme caution, coupled with a good amount of under-the-radar blog outreach, with any further official sites that were to be created. Otherwise the studio efforts simply aren’t going to be able to compete with the enthusiasm ordinary people have to create content and make a name for themselves.