Clever Digital Marketing Propels Cloverfield to Huge Opening Weekend

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By Kerry Trimmer

Cloverfield, the horror flick about a monster attacking Manhattan, from director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams, grossed $46.1 million in box offices nationwide over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. And it owes a big chunk of that success to some brilliant digital marketing.

How does a movie whose title wasn’t even revealed until mere weeks before its release come out of out of relative oblivion to crush its competition over a holiday weekend? The answer is simple: by capitalizing on the buzz generated by months of a carefully executed marketing campaign. Thanks to J.J. Abrams and Paramount’s ingenious and largely Internet-driven campaign, the movie became a virtual “hype machine” in the weeks leading up to its release.

Abrams and Paramount executed their marketing campaign with a two-prong approach, utilizing both traditional and unconventional advertising methods to generate online buzz about the movie. Following the traditional movie promotion approach, they marketed on outdoor billboards and in brief TV spots. In addition, they strategically placed trailers before huge blockbusters such as Transformers, providing limited and enigmatic information about the movie’s topic, even withholding its title.

Where Abrams and Paramount hit the jackpot, however, was in their Internet-driven marketing campaign, which occurred simultaneously with their more traditional ad efforts. Here, they utilized a multi-dimensional strategy. Numerous Cloverfield Web sites were generated, including the movie’s official site, which featured photos, the release date, and even a widget that could be grabbed from the Web site.

Abrams and Paramount also had a great MySpace and Facebook strategy. The primary characters in Cloverfield each have their own MySpace page (here’s one for Rob - note that every detail of the page, including friends’ comments, relates to other characters in the film), along with blogs documenting their lives and events in real time, leading up to the movie’s release. Then, there is Jamie & Teddy, a dummy site “created” by two characters from the Cloverfield universe documenting their relationship and their lives. (To see the site, click the picture of the bears, then enter the password “jllovesth“.)

Occurring parallel to all of the abovementioned Web activities is the “Slusho” campaign. Slusho is a slurpie-like drink with its own homepage: Slusho product home page complete with a “make your own Slusho commercial” contest. Slusho became directly linked to Cloverfield a few weeks prior to its release, at which time the movie’s lead character Rob announced on his MySpace page that he would be moving to Japan to take a job with Slusho’s parent company, Tagruato. This set into motion a chain of events involving Rob, Targruato, and a monster in the ocean moving towards Manhattan, bringing us right up to 1-18-08, Cloverfield’s release date, in real time.

The Cloverfield story highlights the full power of marketing on social networks. By utilizing a number of Web 2.0 platforms, JJ Abrams and Paramount were able to create their own complex, virtual Cloverfield universe, generating a base of curious, invested fans. Keep in mind, too, that none of the information about Slusho or Targruato is even revealed in the movie - a fact which, after seeing the movie, led me back to the Internet, searching for explanations and answers.