Saturday, February 17, 2007

Mooninite guru?

Hopefully we all understand by now that this Mooninite business was a viral marketing campaign that eschewed traditional ads in favor of enlisting the participation of wised-up youth. Members of the target audience were supposed to notice these LED throwies, recognize the Mooninite character (or at least recognize it as a silly cartoon figure of some kind), steal the signs, blog about them, take photos and post them to Flickr, and so forth. Which is exactly what some of them did.

There's a far more sophisticated version of this sort of viral marketing campaign going on even as a write this. A few days ago, Nine Inch Nails fans figured out that highlighted letters on one of NIN's tour t-shirts were a message leading to the website Iamtryingtobelieve.com. Since then fans have been led to discover other websites, audio recordings including a leaked album track from the forthcoming NIN album "Year Zero," working telephone numbers, and more, all carefully prepared in advance. These websites, recordings, phone numbers, and so forth embroil one in an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) whose storyline is the same as the one in "Year Zero": America is a dystopia, and violent resistance is on the move.

Back in August 2005, I wrote an item for Ideas about Jane McGonigal, then working as a designer and "puppetmaster" for 42 Entertainment, an Emeryville, Calif.-based outfit that creates elaborate ARGs for marketing purposes. McGonigal was branching out into political protest, using the same online social networking tools she'd manipulated for 42 Entertainment in order to get Americans in every state to reshelve copies of Orwell's "1984." Tomorrow McGonigal, now a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, will be the first respondent in the Wired Science blog's "Ask a Scientist" feature. Got any questions for her about this Mooninite stuff, or viral marketing, or wired political activism? You can post questions here.

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READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2 | Zebro video | Red Sox vs. Mooninites | Danger Bomb Clock | Mooninite kudos | Mooninite Man sighted | Mooninite guru? |

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:08 PM

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