More than meets the eye..

No I'm not talking bout the spectacular Transformers and I *am not* going to talk about it, although together with Die Hard 4.0, these two movies really stir up all my hypes and excitements in this holiday.

With "More than meets the eye" as my title, I'm actually talking about a movie trailer, which has heated up the internet world recently, if you're aware of. People Google it, blog about it, You-Tubed it, and even doing some researches on it, but the interesting part is, even with all those heat discussion going on and on, the main question that keep running around the table is still the basic one:

----"WHAT IS THAT?"

Here's a quote describing the trailer:
"It is from the perspective of people's camera in NYC. A huge earthquake breaks up a going away party. The people at the party go to the roof top just in time to catch lower Manhatten erupt into a ball of fire! They make their way to the street to witness the head of the statue of liberty fly down the street, end clip with screaming! Insane! "

Nobody knows what is THE TITLE of the movie and the rest of the details of the movie. The only information obtained from the trailer are: 1) it's a production of J.J.Abrams (picture) (producer of 'Lost'); 2) it's distributed by Paramount Pictures; 3) it's a disaster movie, perhaps sea-monster; 4) it will be released on 18th January, 2008.

.. and as this most-talked about mysterious movie DOESN'T YET HAVE a name, forums on www give a codename 'Cloverfield' to refer to.

So now you can try to google the keyword 'Cloverfield' and look what you'll get. I've tried, and what I got was an amazed feeling.

Talk about PUBLICITY STRATEGY, they attached the trailer to the premier of Transformers, playing it before those gigantic robots hitting the screen -- Yeah perfect timing to get the widest coverage of their publicity, what a commercial cliche! I wasn't impressed by it; and the trailer is actually scenes that captured using a home video camera, which we'll get a lot of shaking (while running) and up-side-down scenes (assuming the camera holder falls down..) -- OK, 'Blair Witch Project' debuted the idea years before, nothing impressio.

.....but... they *DO NOT* put a name for the movie, and they **DO NOT** share any copies of the trailer on www!!! and now this is impressive!!

OK fine with the 'Title-less strategy', at least the codename managed to solve the problem, but what if nobody care enough to give it a codename? How on earth people are going to look up for something which it doesn't have a name?

And the issue of the availability of the trailer on www is BIG. I mean if you want to introduce one cool stuff to everybody on earth, you gotta show this stuff to them, at least fragments of the entire; but as far as I could search, the 'copies' of the trailer on www were all sneakily recorded using camera-phone, and sometimes, you'll see this as a damn turn-down to your curiosity:

So I say this is a "More than meet the eye" publicity strategy, and if it is NOT a mistake (like the trailer was mistakenly released by Paramount Pictures or whatsoever), then this IS truly a BRILLIANT PLOT that gets everybody's appetite whetted, and the heat of the relevant topics happened on www is a vivid proof for their success, at least at this early run of their publicity campaign, but I don't think the heat will remain if Paramount Pictures doesn't come out with something more solid besides this 'mysterious aura' they had created for the untitled 'Cloverfield'.

One question. I know heating up 'gossip' or 'controversy' is already an obvious lame publicity strategy which most marketing teams are still highly relying on, then bombarding belief or trend a.k.a. chaos into the market is another marketing strategy which apparently need huge load of dollars, and now we have this another cost-saving but rather risky option of publicizing a work: boosting curiosity and creating 'UNKNOWN'. It's not new, but just not popular, because it needs other factors to support it like BIG NAMES BIG BRAND BIG ISSUE behind, and precise market psychology analysis, etc.

-- so my question is: for a product/piece of work that only practices a very very basic 'publicity marketing' which might seem to be less than nothing compare to those biggies stated above, would you still buy into it?

Well, I'm talking about my little ULAM project.

(Jom lah...)