Studios Turning to Elaborate Internet Games for Promotion

Jeanine Salla is responsible for what could be one of the most elaborate movie promotions ever conceived. And she doesn’t even exist.

But there’s her name, in the credits of the trailer and poster for Steven Spielberg’s “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” next to the title “sentient machine therapist.”

Don’t know what that phrase means? Then do a simple Web search. You’ll find that Salla has her own site, dated, curiously, about the year 2142. It’s one piece of a puzzle game of sites all set around the same time and all presumably created for one purpose: to promote the movie.

This “underground” undertaking, unprecedented even by Hollywood standards, involves the mysterious murder of a character named Evan Chan and clues that are hidden in commercials, print ads, telephone messages and even live promotional appearances, not to mention on the Internet. It’s also the biggest and latest example of just how far entertainment companies will go to hype product.

What sets the “A.I.”-related Web game apart from other promotions is its enormousness--so far there are about 30 sites in the game and new ones keep popping up--and originality, as well as the fact that no one involved with its design will talk about it. Thousands participate in the game online, even organizing into groups such as the Cloudmakers (https://www.cloudmakers.org), which is composed of about 4,500 people dedicated to solving the mystery.

There aren’t really any directions for playing the game. There are just puzzles and clues, which can appear anywhere.

For example, in May at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kathleen Kennedy, an “A.I.” co-producer, and Haley Joel Osment, the young star of the film, made an appearance to discuss the movie, even fielding a question from a presumably planted audience member who asked what it was like to work with Salla. After the presentation, Kennedy passed out Salla business cards with further clues for the game’s players.

“It’s clear to me that the game isn’t just a marketing and promotional ploy,” Andrea Phillips, 26, of Oceanside, N.Y., wrote in an e-mail to Newsday. “The degree of effort that’s gone into the making of this game is so deep, the sheer amount of content so vast that I’ve started to think it was meant to stand on its own feet.”

The “A.I.” game shows how studios are using the Internet to market films in inventive ways. Many in the movie business cite the success of 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” for demonstrating the power of the Web.

With a limited budget, those behind “Blair Witch” created a word-of-mouth campaign through the ingenious use of its Web site and a mock documentary on the Sci Fi Channel to publicize the purported “disappearance” of three student filmmakers.

Taking a grass-roots approach, Artisan Entertainment, which distributed “Blair Witch,” passed out fliers and promotional material to get people to the Web site, aiming to lend the feel of stumbling onto something yourself.

“We’ve always tried to go under the radar and not register as hype,” said Amorette Jones, Artisan executive vice president of worldwide marketing. “You want it to feel organic to the movie.”

According to an April study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, a professional services organization, the growing number of entertainment choices provided by the Internet, television, film and other media puts increasing pressure on entertainment companies in the competition for viewers. So the ability to generate buzz by word of mouth will be important to gain market share and influence.

Companies taking the traditional approach to marketing, the report said, will fall behind. What they should do instead is develop innovative ways of reaching small, focused audiences. Hence, if you want to get the attention of computer geeks, you air a “Blair Witch” “documentary” on the Sci Fi Channel; if you want to get the word out about the “A.I.” online game, you tip off one of the movie gossip Web sites.

“Word of mouth is most powerful when it’s seen as genuine, and it’s not powerful when it’s seen as hype,” said Bennett McClellan, the director of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ entertainment and media practice. “How do you use the medium uniquely to attract the people you want to attract and get them to the product you want to sell to them? Viral marketing is far from a science. It’s still in the realm of alchemy.”

But that doesn’t mean companies aren’t trying. Many settle for quirky Web sites, such as last year’s “Nurse Betty,” which created a faux fan site for the fictional soap opera central to the film, or “The X-Men,” whose makers set up an “official” site for the character of the anti-mutant senator. The site was later “defaced” by pro-mutant hackers.

Those who design these sites, however, are starting to get savvy. Last year, a well-publicized “glitch” in the official site of the first CBS “Survivor” series, supposedly found by someone snooping around the site’s computer code, suggested Gervase Peterson would win the million bucks. He didn’t, but there was speculation the show’s producers created the glitch intentionally to throw people off (and the resulting press didn’t hurt).

The makers of the “A.I.” game also have tried to outsmart those on their trail. Typically, when a studio sets up a Web site containing fiction, it registers it under the company’s name. That’s a dead giveaway that the site’s promotional, and the registry is found fairly easily.

Those behind the “A.I.” game, though, registered their sites under various people with the last name Ghaepetto and included fake addresses and phone numbers. Ghaepetto, of course, is a wink-wink reference to Geppetto, whose Pinocchio is echoed in Osment’s artificial boy in “A.I.”

The MIT gathering wasn’t the only time the “A.I.” fantasy played out in the real world. In May, the “A.I.” folks held “Anti-Robot Militia” rallies in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where actors pretended to protest artificial beings--while also providing clues for the game players who gathered there.

“Studios are finally hiring the right people or figured out that the way you engage people online is to make it interactive,” said Patrick Sauriol, the creator of the Vancouver-based movie gossip site Coming Attractions. “I think the Internet people are really savvy. They know when they’re being taken for a ride. They know [the “A.I.” game] is a promotional thing and it’s in the best interest of Warner Bros., but it’s fun.”