Attack of the Killer Viral Marketing Campaigns!

Viral marketing has gone positively bubonic. While this unconventional approach to building buzz online is nothing new, it has achieved full-blown plague status in the walk-up to the summer movie season. [...]

For the uninitiated, viral marketing involves hatching multiple interconnected Web sites that plug a movie by extending its story lines online. That in turn gets blogs and social networks linking in -- hence its viral nature.

Gone are the days when marketing a movie online involved simply buying a URL like DarkKnight.com and uploading a trailer. Warner Bros. has launched more than 30 Web sites during the past year in support of the latest in the "Batman" franchise, a trail of virtual bread crumbs intended to sate fans until the July 18 release.

Although the bulk of these campaigns play out on the Internet, they also frequently move offline, often in the form of wacky public events intended to amass die-hard enthusiasts. One "Knight" site provides clues pointing to screenings that were scheduled for Monday in 12 different cities.

But fans expecting a handy online guide that lists dates and locations for the screening will be disappointed. Instead, you'll arrive at a spooky Web site featuring portraits of presidents whose images had been defaced by the telltale makeup of the Joker. Clicking on each portrait links to a set of coordinates that require accessing Google Maps to decipher.

Nothing is ever simple in viral marketing.

Some are simple, single-page trifles, whileothers lead into games that would require wartime code-breakingskills to maneuver.

That's viral marketing for you -- compelling, creative andintricate but above all just plain exhausting. Since whenshould marketing feel like doing homework?

There's no direct pitch to consumers urging you to actuallysee a movie. Instead, these sites ask you to suspend realitybefore actually stepping into the theater.

...when too many movies adopt the same understatedmarketing tone, its novelty wears off. When "Cloverfield"played around with viral strategies, it was cool. Now thateveryone else is copying -- not so cool.

But are these elaborate schemes worth the resources thestudios devote to them. Even among the most dyed-in-the-woolfans, it is hard to believe too many have the time orinclination to justify all this. And even if they did, whatsense is there in pitching woo so fervently to an audiencealready guaranteed to show up to theaters? Maybe money isbetter spent targeting audience segments that aren't as likelyto buy tickets.