Web ads for movies are fakes

The 'Godsend' ad tells grieving parents how to clone a dead child.
By CHRIS HEWITT
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
The ad for a lawyer named Audrey Woods was impressive. It was also fake. Woods doesn't exist, her law firm is fictional and, oh, yeah, the Web site to which the ad directed readers? Phony.
Welcome to the latest trend in movie advertising: ads for products that don't exist. The Woods ad, which ran in newspapers in April, really advertised the romantic comedy "Laws of Attraction," in which Julianne Moore played Woods.
Visitors to the Web site, which featured a questionnaire to help you determine whether your husband is a "scumbag," were eventually directed to a site for "Laws of Attraction."
Lots of movies are employing similar tactics to make their advertising more entertaining and involving, especially for young audiences:
U"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was advertised with a site that contained information on the film's totally made-up service to erase your memory.
U"The Stepford Wives," which opened this weekend, has a similar site. It's all about how to turn your wife into a vacuum-cleaner-loving zombie.
UThe trailer for "I Love Huckabee's," which opens this fall, doesn't mention the movie; it's simply an ad for Huckabee's, the fictional department store where the film is set.
UAnd "Godsend's" Web site instructs grieving parents on how to clone their dead children.
It's the last site that has gotten the most attention. That's because it's the one that made people mad enough to threaten a lawsuit, charging that "Godsend" exploited the vulnerability of heartsick parents.
Criticism
Bob Garfield, a critic who writes for Advertising Age magazine, calls the "Godsend" site "disgraceful."
"It's a classic example of how allegedly creative people are so caught up in their own cunning that they neglect the obvious. Desperate, vulnerable people who have lost children find this in a Web search and have no idea it's a movie promotion because there's nothing there that gives any movie cues whatsoever, and they are gulled into thinking, even momentarily, that this is real. How could [advertisers] be so insensitive to the real world?"
The allegedly creative people aren't eager to answer that question. The studios behind "Stepford" and "Huckabee's" declined to comment, and New Line, which released "Laws of Attraction," would only supply the following, via e-mail: "Our advertisements are meant to generate attention for the movie in a fun and innovative way. They reflect the comedic spirit of the film and are clearly not intended to do anything else."
That's pretty much what Tom Ortenberg, president of the company that released "Godsend," thinks.
"The people who are outraged by this are people who just seem to enjoy getting outraged about stuff. They're just ambulance chasers," says Ortenberg.
"The average person is spending about 10 minutes on the site, so you know it's ... something of an interactive experience. When people click on, they don't necessarily know it's a joke, but when they leave the site, the majority know we're selling a movie."
Still, Ortenberg acknowledges the Web site, which has been altered so its trickery is more evident, could have fooled some people. In its earliest days, two months ago, the site came up whenever anyone used the Google search engine to find information on cloning, and it was not clear that it had anything to do with a film. The result? If you wanted to find out about the movie, you had to do a little work. That was by design.
"The age of static marketing is over. There's a general recognition that for Internet-based movie marketing to be effective, it has to be more interesting and interactive than just a static site where you watch a trailer," says Ortenberg. "There needs to be more to the experience, which is why we're moving into nontraditional marketing."
It's here to stay
Get used to that sort of thing. Web sites are effective and cheap. Ortenberg says the "Godsend" site cost $10,000, at a time when big-budget movies routinely spend $50 million on marketing. So phony Internet sites are here to stay.
"The Internet has become a key outlet to creating demand for films, for obvious reasons. That's where kids are. In advertising, everyone wonders what happened to the 14- to 22-year-old males. Well, they're online," says Rob Buchner, managing partner at Fallon Inc., the Minneapolis-based agency that has done work on a number of films, including the upcoming "I, Robot."
Buchner says the Internet can be a great way to market to young people. Having been exposed to advertising since they were infants, they are so aware of how marketing works that they tend to rebel against it, unless it strikes them as fun.
Fallon's campaign for BMW a few years back, while not a movie campaign, was designed to look like a movie. A series of short films, created by big-name directors, created a soft sell for BMW that led people to the Internet, where they could dig up back stories and subplots to the films.
"Youth culture rewards creativity," says Buchner. "They are savvy, so when a marketer really tries to bring them into an entertainment experience, where they can participate and are rewarded through that involvement, they'll tell their friends. These sites get this 'viral' pass-along factor, which is a very cost-effective way to promote any product."