Writing for Independent Film Channel, Stephen Saito looks at a handful of derailed viral marketing campaigns for films. His round-up is inspired by a recent effort for Sony’s disaster film 2012, where marketers set up a web site for a fictional government agency dedicated to human survival. The effort sent so many serious inquiries to NASA about a coming disaster that the organization set up its own site setting facts straight about the 2012 apocalypse legend. Saito looks at other campaigns that attracted the wrong attention, from LA bomb squads dismantling newspaper racks playing the Mission Impossible theme to Boston police considering that terrorists might shroud their next strike in a cartoon character flipping the bird.
Read more at IFC.
