WHILE most brands and their marketers are struggling to use the internet to its maximum marketing advantage, Hollywood is making blockbusters out of their promotions online, helping move consumers through the product consideration and buying cycle faster — and boosting box office grosses. If you thought Jurassic Park III, Swordfish, Grinch AI are some of the best we have ever seen on the big screen, you ought to experience what they did on your personal one. Fox, Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers are heralding a new era with some mind-blowing concepts that have redefined internet based promotions from just being giveaways and sweepstakes. In one of the most bizarre internet campaigns yet, Warner Brothers had users intrigued this summer with its online campaign for the John Travolta starrer Swordfish, an action packed movie woven around cyber crime. The online campaign was centred on a Web site with ten hidden “levels” of password-accessible content. At the first level, visitors to the site ‘ operationswordfish.com ’ were greeted only with a cryptic page that simply denied users access. But as weeks went by, the Warner Bros released more passwords into the public domain through the film’s TV promos and posters. More interestingly, it used its new sister concern AOL’s IM and ICQ to distribute some of the clues. And a new screen name, “gabrielshear” was created, which distributed them. Gabriel Shear is Travolta’s name in the movie. With every password cracked, users would get access to more and more dope on the movie. After the final password, users became eligible for a huge set of giveaways. Not to be left behind, to promote its Jurassic Park III Universal Pictures toyed with rich media ads, downloadable applications and even wireless messaging as a channel to push the movie. The studio developed a “Top of mind, All the time” downloadable application that sat pretty on the users’ System Tray alerting them whenever new content was added. Accessing the icon gave users a menu to visit the website, view more content, and even buy the tickets for the movie online. The main promo idea that took the cake was a Rich Media takeover campaign spread across many portals. Here, when the page downloaded, the unsuspecting user was caught unaware with a shadow of a huge dinosaur flying across the web page. Seconds later, the ones who had their speakers tuned on heard a screeching howl, and to their surprise, saw a claw rip through the page, like in the original TV promo. Director Stanley Kubrick would have loved to see what movie marketers did for his Artificial Intelligence, completed by Spielberg after the former died. In one of the most well executed internet promotions, sci-fi fans were first tipped off to the sites by a title that appeared in the trailer’s credits: a “sentient machine therapist” by the name of Jeanine Salla. It all starts when users typed “Jeanine Salla” into Google and click on the first search result, a link to “Bangalore World University” (you can still try it!). The site included e-mail addresses that sent back-automated responses and phone numbers that reach recorded messages offering other clues that take fans deeper and deeper. Salla’s Web page also has links to her Web calendar, personal pages and voicemail. Other links take users to additional sites featuring white papers, press releases, Web zines, banner ads, and pages for robot advocacy groups. Along the way, it also helps visitors crack the user id and password of someone named Evan Chan and gaining access to his email. I haven’t seen the movie myself, to find out whether Jeanine or for that matter Evan have anything to do with the movie at all. But what I am sure about is that the amount of mystique story telling that these virtual ambassadors did would have created an unimaginable hype for the movie. Moral of the story: Entertainment marketers need to explore learnings from these spooky web dramas to develop their low-cost, re-skinned strategies for the web. And as Hollywood continues to create innovative solutions that provide a compelling, experience and seamless opportunities to address movie-goers, movie promotions will increasingly continue to be redefined. (The author is the Co-Founder of Webchutney) -