Good and bad viral marketing.

Viral marketing seems to be a loose term for Internet based marketing that depends on people spreading the word amongst themselves as well as things like puzzle websites. There's good and bad.

Bad: Cloverfield: This was extremely effective as it brought a lot of publicity and created a huge opening weekend however it pissed a lot of people off including me. There was fake news footage and websites and various other stuff that raised one's curiosity about the film. What is the origin of the creature? What does the Japanese company have to do with it? etc etc. However the thing that pissed many people off, including me, is that very little of this stuff tied into the actual movie?! Almost none of the questions were answered. If I had been one of the people who spent a lot of time analyzing all this stuff I'd have been really pissed.

Good (so far): Watchmen. I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the marketing for Watchmen, partly because of the Cloverfield experience. However there have been some interesting little things. The video below popped up on youtube. To me this is good marketing. It's interesting for people who have read the graphic novel the movie is based on and also gives some info for people who haven't. It doesn't give away anything from the film but not seeing it won't leave questions unanswered. It's also pretty cool how well done it is. I'm curious how many of the comments that act as if it is real footage are planted by the studio and how many are real people playing along. Click through on the image to see the comments and there may be new videos. The page's owner thenewfrontiersman is something from the novel but I don't remember exactly what.