The Future of Marketing&;#063;

It's involved hundreds of hours of processor time, meetings in New
York, Chicago and LA, faxes, phonecalls, voicemails and e-mails. This
isn't some high powered business take-over. It's a marketing ploy and,
if you haven't already encountered the AI campaign, you clearly haven't
been paying attention...

Based on a series of stories in Brian Aldiss' anthology, 'Supertoys
Last All Summer Long', AI has been a long time coming. Stanley Kubrick
planned to make the film, but his death in 1999 prevented it. Kubrick
had traded over 750 pages of notes about the project with Steven
Spielberg, and had mentioned to friends that Spielberg was the ideal
director for A.I, so he was the obvious person to complete the film.
There were expectations of something big. What no-one expected was the
scale of the marketing campaign. The campaign takes the format of an
online and offline game, in which players attempt to find the killer of
Evan Chan. It has three start points; two hidden messages in the
credits of the trailer and a web address on the back of the film
poster. Keen fans spotted these helped along by someone calling
themself "ClaviusBase" who mailed Aintitcoolnews.com on the day the
Internet-only trailer was released, pointing out that Jeanine Salla is
listed in the credits as Sentient Machine Therapist and suggesting that
a search on Google might be a good idea. This search reveals Salla's
home-page.

The trailer also features a series of notches in the type that spells
out "Summer 2001". By counting the notches on each letter, a US phone
number, 5033215122, is revealed. When the number is called, a spooky
answerphone message is revealed, also directing callers to the Salla
website. From here on in, things start to look odd. Sites link through
to futuristic family home pages featuring people who shouldn't even be
born yet. The suspicious death of Evan Chan is mentioned. Strange flash
movies appear warning eager sleuths off the trail. To make things even
stranger, there are no mentions of the film AI, but instead, links
through to pro and anti robot websites. The sites reveal that it's 2142
and artificial intelligence is a normal part of society, with people
and houses run entirely through advanced technology.

This has brought new ethical issues into account; should robots have
equal rights or are they taking jobs from humans who should rightfully
have them? It soon becomes clear that there's a whole world of 22nd
Century sites out there and to find out who murdered Evan, you'll need
to look at them all. To add to the realism, not all the sites are
designed to look professional. There's a blend of everything from
personal homepages with family photos to university research sites and
corporate websites requiring passwords for access. The Cloudmakers
named after Evan's boat, provide an essential reference guide, offering
a database and updates on the game, alongside their 24/7 discussion
forum. They sniff out any red herrings and clues provided by the game
moderators (referred to as the 'puppetmasters ') The sheer scale of the
game requires a community to solve it - something the creators clearly
realised.
As one gamer commented; "This game is being played interactively, based
on Cloudmaker hivemind response time modifications to the puzzles were
being made in real time after seeing how quickly the puzzles were being
solved"

Without giving too much away, some of the tricks required include
highlighting HTML to reveal hidden messages, translating chemical
symbols and numbers into letters, reading Greek, Japanese, hexadecimal
and binary notation - along with good old-fashioned sleuthing. Meetings
in New York, LA and Chicago all provided different parts of the puzzle,
via jigsaws and messages in the bathrooms.

Many of the puzzles have so many potential solutions that people have
written computer programs to crack them - one player alone commenting;
"Over 96 combined CPU hours on 20 Pentium III machines working
simultaneously. It's done." And that was just to solve one piece of the
puzzle. The Cloudmakers are databasing all the solutions to log
combinations that have been tried. Oh, and don't think that just
because you've visited a site, you've cracked that part of the game.
They're updated regularly with new teasers.

Some wily marketers have endeavoured to drive traffic to their own
sites by incorporating clues, puzzles or mentions of key characters.
However, cloudmakers.org discovered the game designers registered all
their sites under the name 'Ghaepetto', so that sites which aren't part
of the game can be quickly sniffed out using a WHOIS lookup [WHOIS
allows you to get details of the owners of domain names, and lists all
the domain names that a person owns.]
So who came up with the idea? The PR's for AI claim 'No comment' when
asked about it. Rumours suggest Kubrick may have left pre-production
guidelines detailing such a campaign, particularly given that the
original e-mail came from Clavius Base - the name of the moon base in
2001. But no-one really knows.

Thousands of people are getting sucked into a campaign, run by
'Puppetmasters' to find a futuristic murderer created from beyond the
grave. Are you getting freaked out yet? Join the game and you soon
will...