The trailer for Tobias Buckell's latest novel Sly Mongoose has been out for a while (the book hits stores in August). Instead of focusing on the process of writing or why he's qualified to write this book, Buckell made a trailer that focuses on world-building. The selling point of Sly Mongoose, according to this trailer, is the insanely cool planet where it takes place and the floating cities that cling to its upper atmosphere. We don't get much of a sense of the plot, just a sense of place. And if the plot is as cool as this planet, you'll be sold.

By far my favorite subgenre of scifi book trailers is for the subgenre of erotic fiction. You don't see this kind of book plugged a lot at cons, or in the magazines, but you sure see it a lot on YouTube when you search for "book trailer scifi." I love this trailer for Lexxie Couper's novel Shifting Lust — the music totally works, plus there is a shape-shifter "like no other" and lots of long, loving shots of VR-looking semi-naked people. What is the plot? Um, plot? You want a plot?

Another way to go if you want to promote your book is to go totally lo-fi. That's what Jeff Sommers did with his trailer for futuristic Mickey Spillane-style noir book Digital Plague. What I like about this trailer, aside from the fact that there is a lot of gratuitous "kill kill kill" stuff, is the fact that it really conveys the novel's sense of satiric fun as well as its shoot-em-up premise. Like the trailer for Sly Mongoose, this trailer won't give you much of a sense of the plot, but you do get a feeling for the world where it's set. I wonder if this means book trailer makers think that scifi books sell based on world-building rather than on plot or narrative structure?

Though ostensibly about this preposterous double-subliminal thing, where ads with subliminal messages to BUY BUY BUY are also filled with yet another layer of subliminal messages to VOTE VOTE VOTE, Agency is mainly a perfect time capsule of late-1970s culture. Everybody wears these insane floor-length fur coats and smokes. In this little bonus scene that I have for you below, from the establishing scenes at the beginning of the movie, we are treated to the "wackiness" that is the ad biz. Look, there's Lee with his fly down talking to a gay! And a kid smoking in the elevator! And a reference to pot! Crazy times, people, crazy times. If you need a dose of strange this weekend, I highly recommend Agency. It's just packed with goodness, including Robert Michum as the evil ad exec and a whole scene with Lee fighting some Hell's Angels. [Agency via IMDB]

Here's hoping that you're getting ready to see people dressed up like Batman in the near future, as the viral marketing campaign for next month's The Dark Knight is about to heat up by going Underground in a big way. And by Underground, we mean Nycticeius Underground. Minor spoilers and internet rabbit holes under the jump.

Set up in April, Gotham City's Citizens for Batman joined Harvey Dent's electorial campaign and The Joker as yet another piece in the sprawling online promotional push for the upcoming release of Christopher Nolan's sequel to Batman Begins:

CFB was founded as a network of concerned Gothamites who keep a watchful eye out for thugs, robbers and worse. These should be the targets of public scorn, not us. We are a peaceful organization that operates within the confines of the law and we always have. Don’t believe the hype; CFB is here to help Batman without hurting anyone, we’re here to clean up this town and we’re here to stay!

Since the site's launch, their forums - which are, in reality, read-only parodies of the message boards that have sprung up to keep track of the viral marketing surrounding the movie, seeded with clues - have been supporting Prop D, a proposed law to get the Gotham police force to stop hunting down Batman and start focusing on "real criminals." Well, on Friday, Prop D was defeated. And Batman's fans don't appear to want to take the result lying down:

Maybe we should protect Batman by confusing them. If someone else was to dress up like Batman, do you think the cops would know the difference? Make them spread their forces?

That suggestion was immediately met with the following warning:

Need I remind you that this forum does NOT condone any discussion of home-grown vigilantism.

Which would seem to be the end of the conversation... if not for a package received by /Film, which led to a password protected forum called "Nycticeius Underground," wherein refugees from Citizens for Batman say things like this:

So we're actually going to hit the streets?

That's the plan.

About time.

It's already been spoiled online that we will see fake Batmen as part of The Dark Knight itself, but with the movie's release only a month away, it's not unlikely that we're going to see some of these faux Caped Crusaders turning up in the real world to let you know what to expect when the movie opens on July 18th.

A New Package from Gotham City [/Film]

One of the most infamous fake commercials from a scifi movie is this ad for Fruity Oaty Bars, a made-up product that appears in Firefly spinoff flick Serenity. Director Joss Whedon wanted to evoke the Asian-Western mashup culture of the far future in this ad, which looks like a mixture of Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and North American iconography. In the film, it also contains a subliminal message that sets off government experiment River's "kill kill kill" programming — when this perky clip airs in a bar, she goes apeshit and murders everyone in the joint.

Another popular scifi ad is this one, for the soft drink Slurm that Fry loves so much in Futurama. It's pretty much a pitch-perfect parody of typical soft drink and beer ads, with the single futuristic addition that the company admits that the drink is literally addictive. Oh, and it's being sold by a mutant snail.

For sheer audacity in world-building, one of my favorites of the bunch is this ad, from Confederate States of America, for the Slave Shopping Network. The flick takes place in an alternate future where the Confederacy won the Civil War, and now slaves are sold on HSN-esque channels, and given Prozac to make them better workers. I just love the way the nice white lady says "You can have the whole family or break them up!" Creeptastic.

Then there are movies that simply update today's brands for tomorrow, to give you a sense of how familiar products might evolve. You may have noticed in 2001: A Space Odyssey that this happens quite a bit. There are references to the Hilton and Howard Johnsons hotel chains, Crest toothpaste, and these two shots showing that IBM will be making spacesuit and spaceship controls in the "far future" of 2001.

You can see more product placement from 2001 here.

Meanwhile, Pepsi actually worked with the Back to the Future creators to imagine a future branding strategy for Pepsi, including a product called "Pepsi Perfect." You can buy Pepsi Perfect bottles on eBay for way too much money.

Apparently, Identigene lays claim to being the first home DNA testing kit, which might in fact be true. It's only recently that companies like 23andme.com have started offering more extensive home DNA testing, offering to chart your ancestry or identify whether you've got a genetic predilection for depression. The thing that makes me think "scifi" when I see the Indentigene site, which you really must check out, is the way it feels like a cheesy ad from 2040. Just because they treat what still seems like cutting-edge technology as if it were as cheap and simple as a home pregnancy test. Which it is.

This is the consumer biotech, future kids: It begins not with a bang but with a cheesy website and late-night TV infomercials. Also, I love how the Identigene test comes in a box that looks like it's for condoms.

Identigene [actually real website for actual service you can buy]

According to the Canwest News Service:

The technology works by beaming waves of hypersonic sound at a pitch that is undetectable by the human ear. The waves continue until they smash into an object such as a person's body. The waves then slow, mix and re-create the original audio broadcast. If the person steps out of the waves, the waves are no longer obstructed and they are rendered inaudible . . . Using the technology, marketers can target an audio message at one person in a crowd, leaving everyone around that person unaware.

[Joe] Pompei's company [Holosonics] manufactured the technology that A&E used. "That's the main thrust of this technology — delivering sound to a very specific area and preventing noise from going elsewhere."

For example, nightclub-goers could hear music delivered through hypersonic methods, while people living nearby would not hear anything. Similarly, an ambulance using a hypersonic sound siren wouldn't disturb households — only cars in front of the ambulance would be able to hear the siren.

While more high-profile uses of the technology may still be a few years away, Pompei said the A&E marketing initiative has led to a deluge of calls from marketers.

The technology scares some consumer groups, including the U.S.-based Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, which is raising legal questions about what rights people have when it comes to being forced to listen to audio broadcasts in public.

Apologizing for raping multiple childhoods with one ill-considered use of intellectual property, Time Warner Cable's Chief Marketing Officer Sam Howe explained that the ad campaign isn't just about making fans realize that Road Runner is much faster than any car out there:

The Road Runner vs Speed Racer spots are created in the same visually stunning style used in the movie and tie together this highly anticipated film with our premier High Speed online service, Road Runner Turbo. We are giving viewers the ability to see exclusive content and a chance to win a new car.

Time Warner Cable Launches Speed Racer Promos [Comics2Film.com]

While there are several bizarre items in the nano-cookware category such as "antibacterial cookware," and the "nano silver teapot," the best items are the nano health supplements that just reek of futuristic quackery. How about the "LifePak Nano" supplement, that promises:

Lifepak® nano is a nutritional anti-aging program formulated to nourish and protect cells, tissues, and organs in the body with the specific purpose to guard against the ravages of aging. Lifepak® nano offers the highest bioavailability with a first-ever nanotechnology process and advanced levels of key anti-aging nutrients in a comprehensive formula.

This technology is called NSSL (Nano-sized self assembled structured liquids), which is a development of minute compressed micelles, which are called nanodrops. These minute micelles serve as a liquid carrier, which allows penetration of healthy components (such as vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals) that are insoluble in water or fats. The micelles are added to the food product, and thus pass through the digestive system effectively, without sinking or breaking up, to the absorption site. The minute micelles carry the phytosterols to the large micelles that the body produces from the bile acid, where they compete with cholesterol for entry into the micelle. The phytosterols enter the micelle, thereby inhibiting transportation of cholesterol from the digestive system into the bloodstream. This advanced technology was applied in the development of Canola Active oil, produced by Shemen Industries.

You can search through the nano-product goldmine at the E-Nano Project for yourself.

Consumer Products [Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies]

Nugget Shoe Polish [Ads of the World]

Another insanely creepy-yet-supposedly sexy robot is the Svedka vodka mascot, who's wheatpasted all over major cities right now. It's not just her weirdly exaggerated T&A, with the hydraulically tiny waist — we're used to that from superhero comics — but it's also the weirdly smug, yet unexpressive — face. She has a sort of mousey, dessicated smirk that makes her seem sort of unpleasant. Like a mean robot drunk, who puts robo-roofies in your glass when you're not looking.

The actual creepiest robot in mass media right now? Is the Burger King breakfast robot, part of a longstanding trend of the fast-food giant trying to make its mascot as alienating and scary as possible. (Which I sort of respect, since McDonald's also has a creepy mascot but tries to pretend otherwise.) In any case, someone went to a lot of trouble to find a Logan's Run-looking actor to play the guy who gets woken up rudely by the robo-King. As with Ashton and his robo-crotch, the Burger-bot gets in a moment of misplaced sexy-creepiness, when the purple-haired woman says he's so good with his hands, and he does a weird hand flutter. Ewwww! And yet, now I sort of want that breakfast thing. It's even ookier than the shaving robot ad.

[Ashton Kutcher from Trendhunter]
[Burger King robot from SuperPunch]

Of course, you could argue that this Star Wars Swede is advertising Star Wars too, while also advertising Be Kind Rewind. And when a bunch of goofballs at a London new media conference decided to Swede the season finale of Torchwood before it even aired, that could be seen as an ad for the TV show, a reminder to watch it on BBC 2 that evening.

But I gotta admit, my life was not complete until I watched the girls in the Sweded Predator shit-talking about pussy.

So does it matter where a meme like Sweding comes from? Does it matter that it originated in some marketer's mind rather than in the pop internet unconscious that gave us Rickrolling and the Numa Numa Dance? After all, the Be Kind Rewind crew have used all the tools that regular old meme-makers use: they created a You Tube page, and even link to Wikipedia on the official Be Kind Rewind website.

Plus, I ask you, do you think these kids Sweding the Matrix have ever even heard of Be Kind Rewind? I don't think so either. But they do rule at karate. Sort of.

Still, I'm left wondering if a manufactured meme like Sweding can ever really be as cool as a million people doing the Numa Numa dance for the sheer fun of it. When does a marketing campaign become a grassroots thing?

In a move similar to Battlestar Galactica hijacking your internets this Friday, Warner Bros will be speeding up show promos and website clips for various Viacom channels, including MTV, VH1, Spike, TV Land and Comedy Central from April 10th through 18th, promoting not only the Speed Racer movie, but also a tie-in contest giving fans a chance to win their very own Mach 5 through the RaceForSpeedRacer.com website.

The promotion is intended to detourn viewer's commercial-skipping DVR habits, according to MTV's creative director of digital fusion, Mark Fortner:

Consumers are utilizing their TiVos and DVRs to speed up programming... So instead of playing against that, we can sort of tie in with the way people are actually consuming media and behaving.

Says Brand Week:

If you're surfing the Web later this week during a specific prime-time hour, the screen could go completely dark, except for a single command: go immediately to your TV and turn on Battlestar Galactica ... The blackouts will happen on sci-fi enthusiast sites like UGO and 1Up as the opening episode launches on April 4. That follows a mid-day live stream that's intended to whet the appetites of the faithful.

The network, part of the NBC Universal family, also is reaching further into the mainstream than it has in prior years, buying TV time during the NCAA playoffs, magazine spreads in non-genre publications such as Elle, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and using celebrities like Brad Paisley and David Letterman to rally newbies to the critical darling's much buzzed-about last 20 episodes.

Partnerships with TiVo and independent pizza parlors, with prizes ranging from iPhones to free food, aim to boost ratings by nudging viewers to watch the show live when it airs Friday night.

The Biz: Sci Fi Goes To Elle And Back To Promote Battlestar Finale [The Biz]

[Zach Mandt's blog, thanks to cde]

Here's what you'll get from this fictional company:

The DATAPOINTS Active Privacy® System allows members to control who sees and analyzes their unified data profile (UDP). In return DATAPOINTS® members receive an ongoing income stream based on the detail, purity and 'interestingness' of their UDP.

A kind of dystopian mashup of Choicepoint and Google, Datapoints comes from a future where Big Brother has been privatized and made "fun." If you're irritated by corporate-speak and web industry jibber-jabber, you've got to check this out.

Datapoints [corporate website]

A promoter named Warren Betts with Fox Pictures writes in his story pitch to Anonymous:

Generally, I cover the world of science and technology and publicize movies with those themes, but this is a very intriguing story and in the film the characters use very sophisticated technology and optics in trying to capture this apparition on film. Next year a Japanese company is introducing the first camera (very expensive) that will allow photographers to shoot in the invisible light spectrum. This might make a very powerful tool for understanding this phenomenon and the possible scientific causes. The public is very interested in this subject and I wanted to check with you and see if you might be interested in hearing more about this? Would this possibly be something you would be interested in covering on your pages?

Look, I have no problem with product tie-ins or goofy expensive shit that people buy when they like a movie. Hell, I have a ton of ridiculously expensive kaiju dolls — some of them are from the 1970s, and who knows what they'd be worth on Ebay. But nobody sold me those dolls pretending that they were somehow a "scientific" method of making Gamera come hang out with me, or helping me reach my dead mother. Pretending that something unscientific from a horror movie IS science in order to sell people movie tickets and expensive cameras is, as Penn and Teller would say, bullshit.

And it's the crappiest kind of viral marketing, too.

Hewlett Packard used a service called PayPerPost to pay bloggers to create posts or viral videos to promote Hewlett Packard's new digital camera. One woman had her children smash a Fuji camera with a hammer, filmed it, and put it on YouTube. The video didn't actually catch on virally, but did represent a strange and disturbing new phase in the evolution of advertising. A woman who clearly just wanted to feed her kids actually used her kids in a specious ad campaign in order to earn cash. This isn't the only time companies have tried this kind of stunt — paying bloggers a pittance to develop advertising for rich advertising firms — and it's bound to become more popular as more people get their entertainment via places like YouTube. In fact, Hewlett Packard had a much more successful viral ad campaign two years ago, in which people playing "finger soccer" on their desks at work and uploading the vids to YouTube were eventually outed as part of an ad campaign to make HP seem as cool and fun as Apple. By the time the outing happened, however, hundreds of people had spontaneously joined the "finger soccer" campaign just for fun, not realizing that the videos they uploaded were part of a viral advertising effort.

Another recent ad campaign that tried to use Web communities to generate artificial buzz was internet hardware manufacturer Cisco's "human network" campaign. You may remember seeing the phrase "human network" in Cisco ads, but Cisco wanted to do more than create a slogan. They wanted people to start using the phrase "human network" as everyday slang for the internet — the idea, I think, would be to cement a connection in people's unconscious minds between Cisco, the internet, and a kind of Utopian "human network" (which Cisco hardly is, given that its technology is what makes the Great Firewall of China possible). According to digital marketing blog ChasNote:

Since the "human network" isn't yet a well-defined phrase, [Cisco] enlisted thought leaders to volunteer their own definitions, without guidance from Cisco or Ogilvy. Contributors included a handful of FM authors, such as Boing Boing's David Pescovitz, 43Folders's Merlin Mann, Metafilter's Matt Haughey, GigaOM's Om Malik, Wi-Fi Networking News's Glenn Fleishman, Newsvine's Mike Davidson, XYZ Computing's Sal Cangeloso, TechCrunch's Mike Arrington, Searchblog's John Battelle and Make's Phil Torrone. These authors penned their thoughts and plugged them into Cisco ads on their own sites. The ads then invite readers to visit a Cisco landing page that hosts definitions from other thought leaders and gives them an opportunity to vote for a favorite. If they don't see a definition that gets it right, they can also click to the "human network" page at Wikia (a collection of freely-hosted wiki communities built on the same software as Wikipedia) to edit the definition there.

Why are these campaigns a harbinger of things to come? First of all, they are directly engaged with a form of media — social networks — that are only likely to grow bigger as time goes on. Advertising can't only be those little tiny Google ads that go up the side of the page, and advertisers are going to do everything they can to become part of the content on a YouTube or Facebook so that they are more closely woven into the fabric of those networks. After all, you go to YouTube to see wacky videos, not to read the ads. So if advertisers can infiltrate the videos and make you watch their stuff, it's as if you've voluntarily tuned into a TV ad.

This is more disturbing than what I guess you could call traditional advertising mainly because a lot of it is extremely misleading. Ads that are "teasers" are one thing — you know, putting some cool phrase or image out there, only to reveal that it's an Altoids ad three weeks later. But ads that pretend to be real endorsements from regular people? That hide their corporate sponsorship, and use the ideas of underpaid people? It's like turning YouTube into a marketing sweatshop. Advertising dystopia, here we come.

Well, basically, here's the deal. io9 is free to you because advertisers are going to start buying ads that will run on the site. You already knew this, so don't act all shocked. Usually advertisers want to know who the audience is that they're reaching with their ads — that helps them decide if they want to give us money to run their ads. So, in part, the demographic information is for advertisers (minus your names and email addresses, which we don't give out to anybody). So if you like io9 and want us to keep zooming, please support us by filling out the survey.

It may not make sense, but it is the way of consumer capitalism, my humanoids. In this region of this planet, it is our way of allocating resources — though many of our wise ones believe it will not always be. Still, it is how your friendly editors and writers at io9 are compensated for their labor, and earn money for spaghetti.

And so, take the freakin survey people. Jeez.

Demographic Survey for io9 [via io9 Master Control Program]

A bizarrely erotic ad for Phillips razors features a robot straight out of I, Robot and a futuristic house that reminds me of something from Greg Bear's classic novel Eon. Definitely cyber, definitely all about buying a razor.

An Israeli ad for a dairy is snatched right from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. We see an old-fashioned factory, but then when the factory owner opens his doors we discover it's a tiny island of old-schooliness in the middle of an ultra-futuristic cyberworld.

A bizarro ad from Mountain Dew creates an early cyberpunk vision ripped straight from William Gibson's Neuromancer, with corporations ruling the world and high tech innovation the only hope for freedom. Except, of course, the rebels in this world are trying to create "the ultimate soft drink."

A Levis ad plays with imagery from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to create this futuristic wasteland where a guy lassos a car (think of the skateboarding pizza delivery punk in Snow Crash), which turns out to be self-driving (Transformers or KITT anyone?).

An ad for Playstation 2 depicts a Max Headroomish future of multinational media conspiracies:

Sure these ads are creative, and there's nothing wrong with getting inspiration from cool punked-out scifi subcultures. But once the subculture is smooshed all over SUVs and razors? Then it's just a hollowed-out shell of itself being used to sell stuff. Old-school cyberpunk novels are still great, but today's cyber is VH-1 material at best.

There are three more postcards in the set. Collect them all! [Kung Fu Rodeo] Or visit this freakish Wall-E tie-in site, allegedly belonging to Wall-E manufacturer Buy n Large, which does an eerily good parody of marketing speak at consumer robotics companies.

Here are some more things that Sony might be trying to say about itself with this ad:

Most of our organization has no immediate obvious purpose . . . A lot of pieces of the organization resemble decayed portions of other pieces of our organization . . . Some pieces of our organization are non-functional, though they closely resemble functional pieces of related organizations . . . Our corporate practices are not the best designed, but rather reflect an accumulation of historical accidents . . . We retain bits of those who invade our corporate DNA, though with not much rhyme or reason.

Corporate DNA [Omics! Omics!]