It’s 2007. 

The public has two years before the introduction of the first iPhone, and the latest Spider-Man film is a commercial flop. As you settle into your movie theater seat for Michael Bay’s Transformers, a strange trailer about a mysterious attack on New York City plays with no title, but the promise of J.J. Abrams’ involvement. What is this mystery film, and why would they refrain from adding a title?

When I first asked my father what he thought the cryptic trailer for Cloverfield (2008) could be, he told me he witnessed online speculation that it was a new Planet of the Apes or Star Trek (2009) film that Abrams was already attached to at the time. Upon hearing this, I was interested in how particular Paramount Pictures was about the marketing for this film; never before had I seen a film marketed by showing nothing in its trailers, rather crafting a narrative via the Internet to prime viewers on what to expect.

Cloverfield took a similar marketing approach as 1999’s The Blair Witch Project–another found footage film with a different narrative approach. Instead of the small-scale story of three missing college students in the woods in Maryland, Cloverfield deals with a kaiju attacking New York City from the perspective of a handful of its constituents. The concept of viral marketing was ambitious for such an experimental film. Not only was it highly unconventional, but it was also a major studio film, placing it further into the spotlight. Paramount chose to withhold major plot details to engage fully in the mysterious nature of its first trailer, choosing to not reveal the monster initially in order to hopefully build increased suspense. 

By some miracle, the film maintained a significant level of secrecy leading to its commercial and critical success.  After the eerie trailer release, the following interactive digital marketing had two prongs that focused on the film’s characters and the factors that led to the monster being unleashed: Myspace profiles for the characters, and an ARG exploring a nefarious corporation’s practices. What made this style of marketing so important was that it appealed to a wide variety of audiences allowing basic moviegoers to look at the profiles through their own Myspace accounts and dedicated Abrams fans to try to figure out what the film could possibly be about. Without this innovative marketing campaign consisting of impactful trailers and an online component, Paramount would have alienated audiences from what was essentially an American Godzilla.

For the film’s major characters, Myspace profiles with in-character blog posts interacted with each other, giving insight into the relationships that would be present in the film. While the pages did not affect the experience of the film, the profiles provided a closer look at who these characters were and how they may act. Youtube personality Dylan B dives into these profiles and the character side of the marketing campaign in “The Cloverfield ARG – FULL EXPLANATION”. It becomes evident during the video that there are connections between these characters and the Japanese corporation Tagruato. These connections got a significant portion of the general public talking about the movie, further maintaining the element of mystery that would be relevant throughout the entire campaign.

The ARG also focused heavily on the Tagruato Corporation via an in-universe website and its environmental impact on ocean drilling for resources. Their practices even catch the attention of fictional environmental organization T.I.D.O Wave which denounces Tagruato’s practices and commits cyberattacks to get their message across the world. Through learning about the company it is implied that the company is responsible for the monster’s awakening. 

The amount of information given to audiences through the ARG is juxtaposed by the characters in the movie not having any idea what the monster attacking New York is or where it comes from. This allows the audience to speculate its origin because they have been provided information the characters have not. Tagruato’s website emphasizes the importance of the blossoming Internet and technology to the audience just as much as the Myspace profiles, creating a completely new ballpark for studios to market their movies.

According to Dylan B’s video, in-film character Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David) eventually posts that he is starting a new job as a VP of Marketing for Slusho, a subsidiary of the aforementioned Tagruato Corporation. At this point the game and the Myspace profiles are merging, tying the two together with a very strategic timeline of characters “posting” and updates to the Tagruato website. The ARG acts as a clever primer for the film, which is beneficial because it is often difficult to implement full exposition in a found footage film. Strategically putting these pieces in place leading up to the film’s release keeps the audience consistently interested and maintains their attention as the release date draws closer and closer.

The experimental interactive marketing style ties perfectly with the found footage style used in the film. Both the film’s narrative style and marketing campaign build a realistic world for audiences to explore, strengthening the bond between the audience and the characters. The bond the audience has with the characters is tested as they navigate the monster attack on the city, and those who got to know them through their Myspace profiles feel a deeper sense of connection. It’s as if you are watching someone you know going through an apocalyptic scenario and there’s nothing you can do to save them.

In the film itself, little information is given to the characters about what is happening. They were initially documenting a going away party for Rob, but through the Myspace pages, audiences knew more than the characters about who Rob was working for. The dramatic irony compliments the movie, not divulging significant plot details but meshing seamlessly into the film itself. This takes nothing away from general audiences viewing the film, but the marketing certainly helps enhance the characters and their world. With the tools presented, audiences engage with the film rather than consume it, and there’s a new sense of pride in understanding a film rather than just watching it.

Viral marketing campaigns for film gained popularity because of the growing use and expansion of the Internet worldwide. Cloverfield is just one example of how films used viral marketing to get and maintain the attention of audiences through interactivity and self-directed research, giving the audience the ability to be a significant part of the film’s world instead of seeing just a television commercial. There are still films employing this type of marketing albeit on a much smaller scale and level of effort than Cloverfield. This level of promotion without giving anything away is indicative of what J.J. Abrams himself has called the “mystery box,” a technique where the audience is withheld information about something that they know is there but are not allowed to know yet. This is most relevant to Cloverfield’s monster itself, which is not physically visible in any marketing materials.

Clearly, Paramount took the time and the resources to create a marketing project that allowed users to interact with the story themselves rather than trailers and TV advertising spots. Is it possible that Cloverfield’s marketing was a once-in-a-lifetime experience?  With the success of movies like Longlegs (2024), which employed scaled-back yet similar tactics through ciphers and an in-universe fan website about its titular killer, it is evident that audiences itch to interact with new releases rather than have them advertised to them. Interestingly enough, Paramount has maintained the Tagruato.jp domain to this day, and with the news in 2022 that Babak Anvari is directing a new film written by Joe Barton, it is only a matter of time before the theorizing begins yet again.

Retrospective Courtesy of Nadia Arain

Feature Image Credit to Paramount Pictures via IMDb