An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players' ideas or actions.
Jeffrey Jacob Abrams is an American filmmaker and composer. He is best known for his works in the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. Abrams wrote and produced such films as Regarding Henry (1991), Forever Young (1992), Armageddon (1998), Cloverfield (2008), Star Trek (2009), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019).
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way that a virus spreads from one person to another. It can be delivered by word of mouth, or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet and mobile networks.
A teaser is a short trailer and a form of teaser campaign advertising that focuses on film and television programming. It is a videography pre-release move or television show advertisement. Short in length, teaser trailers contain little material from the advertised content to be released.
OurColony is a search opera-type alternate reality game (ARG) and a viral marketing campaign for the marketing of a successor to the Microsoft Xbox. The game asks players to form colonies and earn points by completing various tasks. This use of an ARG is similar to I Love Bees, which was a viral marketing campaign for the Xbox game Halo 2, and another ARG for the Xbox 360 game Halo 3.
Super 8 is a 2011 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by J. J. Abrams and co-produced by Steven Spielberg. The film stars Joel Courtney, Elle Fanning, and Kyle Chandler and tells the story of a group of young teenagers in 1979 who are filming their own Super 8 movie when a train derails, releasing a dangerous presence into their town. The film was shot in Weirton, West Virginia, and surrounding areas, portraying the fictional town of Lillian, Ohio.
A viral video is a video that becomes popular through a viral process of Internet sharing, typically through video sharing websites such as YouTube as well as social media and email. For a video to be shareable or spreadable, it must focus on the social logics and cultural practices that have enabled and popularized these new platforms.
Return to Halloweentown is a Disney Channel Original Movie that premiered on Friday October 20, 2006, and is the fourth and final film in the Halloweentown series. The story follows Marnie Piper going to college at Witch University in Halloweentown, where dark forces try to control her magic.
Cloverfield is a 2008 American found footage monster film directed by Matt Reeves, produced by J. J. Abrams, and written by Drew Goddard. It stars Lizzy Caplan, Jessica Lucas, T.J. Miller, Michael Stahl-David, Mike Vogel, and Odette Yustman. The plot follows six young New York City residents fleeing from a massive monster and various other smaller creatures that attack the city during a farewell party.
Dan Trachtenberg is an American filmmaker and podcast host. He is best known for directing the films 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) and Prey (2022), the former earning him a Directors Guild of America Award nomination for Outstanding Directing – First-Time Feature Film. In 2019, he directed the pilot episode of the Amazon Prime Video series The Boys, and in 2021 directed the pilot episode of the Peacock series The Lost Symbol, on which he also served as an executive producer.
Clover is the production name given to the giant monster in the 2008 film Cloverfield. The creature was originally conceived by producer J. J. Abrams and was designed by artist Neville Page. In the film, the monster's name is never mentioned; the name "Cloverfield" is only given to the US Department of Defense case file of the incidents depicted in the film. The Department of Defense names the creature "LSA" for Large-Scale Aggressor in the film's Blu-ray special feature called "Cloverfield Special Investigation Mode".
Mind Storm Labs is a media production company located in Ottawa, Ontario; Houston, Texas and Orlando, Florida. Their primary focus is on the production of tabletop role-playing games.
Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Although the terms e-marketing and digital marketing are still dominant in academia, social media marketing is becoming more popular for both practitioners and researchers. Most social media platforms have built-in data analytics tools, enabling companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public. On a strategic level, social media marketing includes the management of a marketing campaign, governance, setting the scope and the establishment of a firm's desired social media "culture" and "tone."
Call to action (CTA) is a marketing term for any design to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale. A CTA most often refers to the use of words or phrases that can be incorporated into sales scripts, advertising messages, or web pages, which compel an audience to act in a specific way.
This Man is a person who has allegedly appeared in thousands of people's dreams since 2006, but was never identified in the real world. He was the main focus of a website called Ever Dream This Man?, created by Italian sociologist and marketer Andrea Natella in 2008. The website claimed that the first person who reported dreaming about This Man was a patient of a psychiatrist in New York City in 2006, and that four other patients of the same had also recognized the same face. The website also claimed that more than 3,000 people had contacted the site to share their stories and drawings of This Man. The website offered various possible explanations for the phenomenon, ranging from the mundane or supernatural. None of these theories were supported by any evidence or investigation.
Viral phenomena or viral sensation are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. Analogous to the way in which viruses propagate, the term viral pertains to a video, image, or written content spreading to numerous online users within a short time period. This concept has become a common way to describe how thoughts, information, and trends move into and through a human population.
10 Cloverfield Lane is a 2016 American science fiction horror thriller film directed by Dan Trachtenberg in his directorial debut, produced by J. J. Abrams and Lindsey Weber and written by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle. The second film in the Cloverfield franchise, it stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, and John Gallagher Jr. The story follows a young woman who, after a car crash, wakes up in an underground bunker with two men who insist that an event has left the surface of Earth uninhabitable.
11B-X-1371 is a 2015 viral video sent to GadgetZZ.com, the Swedish tech blog that publicized it. The black-and-white segment is two minutes in length; its title came from the plaintext of a base64 string written on the DVD. It depicts a person wearing what appears to be a plague doctor costume walking and standing around in a dilapidated abandoned building, with a forest visible through former window openings in the wall behind it. Accompanied by a soundtrack of loud, discordant buzzing noise, the masked figure holds up a hand with an irregularly blinking light. The film did not have any credits or claims to authorship.
Cloverfield is an American science fiction anthology film series and media franchise created and produced by J. J. Abrams consisting of three films, viral marketing websites linking the films together, and a tie-in manga to the first film titled Cloverfield/Kishin (2008), all set in a shared fictional universe referred to as the "Cloververse". The franchise as a whole deals with creatures from other dimensions attacking Earth throughout various decades, all as a repercussion of an experiment by an astronaut team aboard the Cloverfield Station in outer-space. Each film depicts the reality-altering effects of their study, which was meant to find a new energy source replacing the planet's depleted resources, only to open portals for assault from various beasts from deep space. All three installments are standalone in nature, though they connect through the Cloverfield story thread. A direct sequel to the first film was announced to be in development in early 2021.
The Cloverfield Paradox is a 2018 American science fiction horror film directed by Julius Onah and written by Oren Uziel, from a story by Uziel and Doug Jung, and produced by J. J. Abrams and Lindsey Weber. It is the third film in the Cloverfield franchise, following Cloverfield (2008) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). It stars Daniel Brühl, Elizabeth Debicki, Aksel Hennie, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris O'Dowd, John Ortiz, David Oyelowo, and Zhang Ziyi. It follows an international group of astronauts aboard a space station who, after using a particle accelerator to try to solve Earth's energy crisis, must find a way home when the planet seemingly vanishes.
