In 2001, Stephen Spielberg released a movie called “A.I. Artificial Intelligence”. It was a project he took over from Stanley Kubrick after his death. There was, what we’d call today a “Viral Marketing Campaign” around it, but it was a pretty novel and new notion at the time. More accurately, the effort was to hype a series of video games related to the IP that never happened – likely due to the box office performance of the film.
The project was called “The Beast.” It did nothing short of change my life and my perception of how stories could be told. I briefly touched on this in my Ted Talk from earlier this year, but given it’s the 25th anniversary of the adventure, it’s worth revisiting some early Internet tradecraft.
The project was run out of Microsoft and consisted of puzzles and stories hidden across the internet and sometimes real world locations. A poster in Brooklyn had a phone number. Calling the phone number led to a name. Googling the name led to a web site. The web site led to some story, some clue, some puzzle. On and on the rabbit hole went. There were clues in the virtual iPod on Apple’s web site, the registration of domain names used, the movie poster had credits for people who didn’t exist, guests on The Tonight Show dropped names. It was wild stuff.
A community formed around a Yahoo Group (a message board) called “Cloudmakers” and an IRC channel (For you kids: Slack is basically a knock off of this). From there, thousands of strangers from all over the globe and all walks of life collaborated to figure out this mystery and follow the story.
I, like many others, would be online until 4am some nights, researching the latest speculation and clues, looking through source code, and sharing theories and ideas with others. It became an amazing, collaborative virtual bulletin board of red yarn, note cards, and thumbtacks. The hive mind and collective information filtering of the community pushed the “Puppet Masters” — as we referred to the story tellers — to their limits. Our group would consume a week’s worth of puzzles, clues, and narrative in sometimes just a few hours. To their credit, they kept the campaign going much longer than they had originally scoped.
I built a member directory to help people stay in touch, then followed that up by building a whole platform to host similar types of online mysteries and scavenger hunts, noting the logistical challenges we had with “The Beast.” One of these was for BMW’s series of short films called “The Driver.” It featured the actor Clive Owen and a stacked list of directors and celebrities. Another was for the Jennifer Garner show “Alias.” Yet another, a short-lived show produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon called “Push, Nevada” — with a real-world “find $1.2 million” component from the clues hidden in the episodes.
There are still active transmedia communities and niche campaigns that pop-up from time to time. The challenges with the format were and continue to be scale, duration, and ROI.
Not enough engagement and the campaign fizzes out.
Misalignment between the effort of the audience and the reward from the creators leads to community frustration and bad vibes.
Too short or lack of depth in a campaign leads to “What? That’s it?” from the community and/or not enough “buzz” and unearned media KPIs.
A campaign with momentum and longevity makes it hard to onboard latecomers and still appease early adopters.
If you are a marketing or creative team, your 6 month roll-out plan can be consumed in 6 weeks, or even 6 days. That will really wreck your GTM strategy. It’s also actually happened; I’ve helped cause it.
As a reward for our Beast efforts however, myself and a few friends and other members of the group were invited by the Puppet Masters to fly up to Microsoft to meet with the team “behind the curtain.” We were scheduled to fly out on Thursday, September 13th, 2001. Two days beforehand however…
It was never rescheduled.
We did get posters with our screen names overlaid in the image. Mine still hangs in my media room.
I made some lasting connections though this as well. Two fellow Cloudmakers and friends attended my wedding. I’m pretty sure more than a few married each other. I was on a Zoom with another one in January.
The Beast campaign was my first real experience at being part of a distributed team, being a leader in a community, and really unlocking the power that technology could have regarding narratives and connecting people. These would influence future projects I built, the technologies I would learn, and the lifelong pursuit of how to connect community and culture. The results of which led to where I worked, where I lived, how I looked at entertainment and experiential marketing. Even the decision to build the community around bringing a sports team to Austin can find its origins here.
How would I build a multi-platform, story world today with a modern set of tools, technology, and AI? Well, that’s an article for another time.
Screen: “The Luckiest Man in America” (Hulu). Great performances in a based on a true story tale about a guy who beat the system on the 80’s game show: “Press Your Luck” .
Music: “Fire” (Jimi Hendrix). Inspired by the steel drum band version my son performed in shows the school band has been giving recently.
Purchase: Feel Good Cleansing Kit (Harry’s) - I got this for the boy. The cleansing brush is the important part here. It’s like a tiny shaving cream brush but for helping to get cleanser into the tricky spots on the face.
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