Film with no advertising, but everyone will know about it 30/4/01

RICHARD WATSON:
An ordinary enough trailer for the latest Spielberg sci-fi film. Nothing strange about this until you look at the version on the internet. On this one there's an intriguing credit - Jeanine Salla is listed as Sentient Machine Therapist. Put that name into an internet search engine, and you find both the woman and her web page.

DAN HON:
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FAN
From there we can read about how one of her daughters was quite close to a man called Evan Chang, and all this is still fictional. We learn that Evan Chang was murdered - pushed off a boat or something - and found drowned. The first puzzle that is in this universe of websites appears. We find on the JeanineSalla.com website that somebody uploaded a letter to the site a couple of hours before Evan was killed.

WATSON:
If you want to discover the game for yourself, leave the room for a couple of minutes. If not, stay with us for an exploration of the next big idea - viral marketing. The logic goes like this - only a couple of thousand people may have entered this fantasy web, constructed on behalf of Stephen Spielberg's film company. But if it becomes popular on the net, or if mainstream TV starts reporting it, then it will generate lots of publicity by word of mouth. If you get it right and people talk about it in their coffee breaks, then it'll spread through the cultural ether like a virus.

TIM CARRIGAN:
HEAD OF VIRAL MARKETING OGILVY INTERACTIVE
The idea of viral marketing is to use the power of word of mouth and get the recipient of the message to be the person who spreads the message. We talk about viral marketing today because we are doing word of mouth with modern technology. The most obvious way to do it is with e-mail. An e-mail is viral because someone receives it and sends it to their friends.

WATSON:
Felix The Cat is a Tim Carrigan creation - a virtual cat you can drag and drop. He even feeds and plays. The message is - buy Felix cat food. Mr Carrigan reckons viral marketing can be 15 times more effective than ads posted on the net and much cheaper - no costly billboards or TV airtime, just focused free-to-air word of mouth.

CARRIGAN:
The key thing is engaging the audience enough. The key to it is when you receive a message like this that you find it amusing enough or useful enough to recommend it to your friends, and that's the hard bit. Things like the movies have used it successfully because you get fun clips. They're great fun to send to your friends.

WATSON:
With more than 1,000 fictional web pages linked to Stephen Spielberg's latest blockbuster, AI's marketing budget would have run into millions, though its backers aren't commenting - a strategy designed to maintain the mystery. But already other businesses and film-makers are looking at similar, if lower budget strategies. South West Nine is a new British film about life in Brixton, South London. It's an edgy story about five characters who have lost their way. Its producer, who says it will be the antidote to the saccharine of Notting Hill, is already planning how to use the viral marketing technique to promote his film.

ALAN NIBIO:
PRODUCER, SOUTH WEST NINE
Most British films don't have that money for the marketing campaign so we have to come up with more inventive ways of getting it to a core audience. It will have a text base, basically mobile phone texting, which has become popular. A lot of people are cashing in on it. It's a fun way of sending your friends and girlfriends or boyfriends messages. We will be building a game on the mobile phones which will go out to and interact with the audience about the film.

CLIP FROM SOUTH WEST NINE:
"Smash The City, Eat The Rich, Carnival Against Capitalism - only the biggest party the world of finance has ever seen."

WATSON:
Timely references in the film to anarchy on the streets. But the makers say that to sell it the marketing has to be that bit more subtle.

ALAN NIBIO:
We are trying to build up intrigue about the film, guide people towards the content of it, and get them excited so it becomes a must-see factor. We can present on a website all the different facets of the film, the subject matter, the music, the actors, the campaign.

WATSON:
Hollywood has woken up to the power of viral marketing on a huge scale with Stephen Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence film. Decode the notches on Summer 2001 and you get a phone number. Ring it and this is what you get:
"Welcome, my child. Once upon a time, there was a forest that teamed with life, love, sex and violence. Things that humans did naturally and that robots copied..."

WATSON:
Travel further into the murder investigation and people from this virtual world even start phoning, faxing and e-mailing you. As new technology gives us the power to cut out irritating ads from our lives, conventional marketing could be as dead as 22nd century Evan Chang.