It’s July 2007. You’re sitting in a movie theater, waiting through the coming attractions for your Transformers screening. Suddenly, the final trailer starts and it’s … a bit unusual. After so many polished upcoming blockbusters, this one begins with flickering Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Productions logos before shifting into found-footage material. A slew of people shout “surprise!!” to a clearly startled man before the camera captures testimonies from various attendees explaining how much they’ll miss the centerpiece of the gathering once he moves away for his new job.
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Suddenly, a loud roar is heard. The lights flicker. The party attendees dart to the rooftop of the apartment building. An explosion in the distance goes off, inspiring everyone to retreat to the streets below. Once they do, chaos unfolds, culminating in the Statue of Liberty’s severed head propelling down from the sky onto the nearby street. Then, it finishes with just a release date: 1-18-08. No title, no indication of what this was. The internet’s speculation went into overdrive over Cloverfield‘s first teaser trailer. Even better, it was the tip of the iceberg for a larger viral marketing campaign that Hollywood has never replicated in overall success.
What Kind of Viral Marketing Did Cloverfield Engage In?
Lore was the name of the game for the Cloverfield viral marketing campaign. Special websites were created, including one whose domain name was simply the movie’s release date, to keep people glued to this project. This included websites and various online documents that divulged details about Cloverfield monster Clover’s origins, which are never even referenced in the final film. Meanwhile, a beverage called Slusho! was wriggled into the Cloverfield mythos after showing up in another project from producer J.J. Abrams, Alias.
Speaking of older Abrams projects, producer Bryan Burk would later explain that the Bad Robot TV show Lost was a guiding star in creating a rich tapestry of lore through viral tie-ins. The group behind this viral marketing did such a good job that people began to see the world of Cloverfield in everything online. Shortly after the teaser was launched in theaters, Abrams had to come out and publicly say a totally separate viral marketing campaign by the name of Ethan Haas Was Right was not connected to this forthcoming blockbuster, despite internet chatter to the contrary.
Online geeks could be forgiven for getting their wires crossed in this regard. After all, part of why the viral Cloverfield marketing campaign was such a success was that it was such a mystery. Here was an original project that didn’t even have an official title until scant few months before its release. This production was a blank canvas that could be anything and everything. That allowed the viral marketing to really grab people’s imaginations. Documents and news stories related to entities like Slusho! and the company Tagruato could finally offer some clues as to what was going on here. Of course, that meant the occasional Ethan Haas Was Right got caught up in the mayhem, but that was a small price to pay.
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In the final weeks of this viral marketing campaign, major news sites would run articles about each piece of new Cloverfield lore dropping, like a video of Clover attacking a Tagruato Corp. power station. There was always a chance Cloverfield could’ve gotten swallowed up by bigger pre-established franchises in the cinematic landscape. However, these viral videos and news pieces kept the film on people’s radars. Who needed a pre-existing brand name when eye-catching viral marketing could do the trick?
Why Hasn’t Cloverfield’s Viral Success Been Replicated?
In the years since its release, Cloverfield‘s emphasis on viral marketing preceded further integrations between Hollywood and online venues like Twitter or Facebook. The days of Cloverfield using MySpace pages to promote its fictional human characters would look almost quaint by the time the Prometheus viral marketing campaign with an explicit Verizon tie-in kicked in. Still, none of these viral campaigns, not even the ones for two subsequent Cloverfield movies, have quite hit the same level of cultural notoriety or rabid fan bases.
The answer to why that is isn’t super complicated. In the years since Cloverfield, mainstream American cinema has only become even more enamored with sequels and franchises. These kinds of projects don’t work with the ultra-secretive and mysterious viral shenanigans of Cloverfield. When everyone can just Google what various Marvel, Star Wars, or Hasbro lore terms mean, it takes the fun out of the proceedings. When J.J. Abrams tried a super ambiguous approach to promoting Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013, for instance, it didn’t quite click. The sense of discovery informing people’s fascination with the Cloverfield viral marketing couldn’t work within a pre-existing saga, not to mention a follow-up where most people knew Benedict Cumberbatch was actually Khan.
Even 2018’s The Cloverfield Paradox as a movie succumbed to these mainstream Hollywood tendencies, with its endless explicit tie-ins to the original Cloverfield movie. This reliance on familiar brand names has, at least, allowed the specialness of that first Cloverfield‘s promotional blitzkrieg to really endure over time. It’s doubtful any Hollywood movie in the near future will as successfully recreate this kind of pre-release hype. Heck, even just launching a stealth teaser trailer like the Cloverfield preview seems laughable in the age of teasers for teaser trailers.
